February 10, 2006
SkypeOut: Not good enough
At my in-laws here in snowy and overcast Vilnius, Lithuania.
Their DSL connection is only 256kbit/128kbit, but does me fine for most of what I need to do. And it’s fairly cheap — about US$13/month for 6Gb. (Although French readers will be snickering at this point…)
I find Skype-to-Skype calls work just fine from here. Although it’s terrible to configure with a USB headset, BT Communicator makes great-sounding calls to the UK. But SkypeOut? Forget it. Novelty value only.
I’m consistently finding the same at home too in Scotland, with a much meatier Net connection. And in the USA. This is getting to be more than anecdotal.
There’s a branding tension between the “free” part of Skype and the “better” part which shows up here. They’ve aligned SkypeOut with the “cheap” side. In their own words on the home page (my highlights):
You can call anyone else on Skype, anywhere in the world for free. And you’ll always be able to do that. There are some other useful things you can do on Skype that aren’t free (but they’re pretty cheap, actually).
And on the next page:
That’s why we have SkypeOut, a low cost way to make calls from Skype to friends who still use those traditional landlines or mobile phones. That means calling anyone, anywhere in the world at local rates.
Not a single mention of clarity or quality. Spot the open goal into which some competitors might kick the ball?
So they’re positioning themselves as a price leader, which is kind of tough when they generally aren’t. And it isn’t a very attractive business proposition either. There are much bigger players with global networks and zillions of minutes who can probably buy wholesale cheaper than you. And do you really want to boast to your investors and owners that your aim is to raise as little revenue as you can get away with? There’s always someone else willing to offer a lower rate and ever worse experience.
But the thing that attracted me to Skype originally was that it was better as well as free. The presence, IM and file transfer made it irresistable to many SOHO/small biz workers like me. The wideband audio makes for a more personal feeling when talking to colleagues and clients — the distance fades away from the mind. Why complement the best on-net call quality around with a lousy PSTN experience? We’ll pay for quality, really!
SkypeIn seems to works OK. I know it isn’t the connection itself that’s at fault. Please, make this product work properly!
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SkypeOut: Not good enough from Skype Journal
At my in-laws here in snowy and overcast Vilnius, Lithuania. Their DSL connection is only 256kbit/128kbit, but does me fine for most of what I need to do. And it’s fairly cheap — about US$13/month for 6Gb. (Although French readers...
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I think you are being a little harsh - perhaps the perspective of a perfectionist?:)
Skype out does have problems - the main one for me is the variability of the quality. I would prefer to know in advance rather than roll the dice. But average quality is good enough - just about. As a non-Telco person desperate not to give business to hated incumbents I am happy to use Skype out. Does that make me a representative user? Dunno.
I have now used SkypeOut extensively on business trips over the past three months. (And the hotels and Bell Canada are wondering why I never have long distance calls on my accounts.) I have to say the quality has been quite good on about 80% to 90% of the calls. I did one conference call with two Skype and two SkypeOut participants ... we could totally focus on the meeting agenda as the call quality wsa so good. In fact the call was going so well it was cut off because my SkypeOut minutes ran out after 85 minutes.
It certainly is good enough to use for all but the most critical of business calls. And at least Skype occassionally asks about the quality of the call when you hang up. I do know (from my network of contacts) they see there can be problems and want to solve them.
The one type of call where I encounter most problems are calls to cell phones. Probably too much compression/decompression going on in those codecs.
I have also been a Packet8 user for over two years; the experience there has been a lesson in how call quality can improve from totally unreliable two years ago to the point where I have problems on fewer than 2% of my Packet8 calls today. Again excellent quality; even the "pregnant delays" are disappearing.
Posted by: at February 11, 2006 10:42 AMI use SkypeOUT all the time to USA landlines and cellphones. There's almost never any problem at all. Ditto for SkypeIN. Indeed, the quality of SkypeOUT to a cellphone is FAR better than between two cellphones (but obviously not as good as on Skype to Skype calls).
I've never called a landline outside of the USA, or received a SkypeIN call from outside the USA, but if there is a problem with such calls, as you claim, then why wouldn't you be pointing to the local telecom as the culprit rather than Skype?
Posted by: at March 22, 2006 05:21 PMI have been using Skypeout extensively on calls to all sorts of countries from the US, Panama, Kuwait, Phillipines, UK, Ghana, Spain, Qatar, Bahrain, Canada, and more the quality has been perfect everytime. I noticed that when using my Belkin skypephone the quality was far better than when I used skype with my PC. Also skypeout calls were of better sound quality then skype to skype calls.
Posted by: at December 26, 2007 03:32 AM