Small but select band of lusers...
lucky me
Users around the world once again experienced problems using Skype on Tuesday morning. As with seemingly identical problems last month, punters initially experienced frustration signing into the service before later reporting that the VoIP software had crashed on their machine. Skype played down the scope of the problem, …
> Any thoughts on an alternative?
Use something SIP-based.
Get yourself a SIP account at somewhere like sipgate.co.uk[1][2] and download something like Xlite[4]. Up and running within minutes, and you get a free[3] landline number to boot.
Vic.
[1] Disclosure: Sipgate is actually a competitor of mine (I resell SIP services). But I don't want hundreds of people looking for a Skype alternative :-)
[2] Beware that site, as it tends to use unencrypted HTTP for most stuff. If you use https://secure.sipgate.co.uk instead, all is SSL goodness.
[3] At the moment. There is no guarantee that they will continue to dish out free numbers. But it's worth it for now.
[4] Sipgate allow yuo to download this pre-configured with your account info from their site.
I've tried using SIP over wobbly connections in far flung places. The result is very crunchy calls with lots of (silent) dropouts. You soon give up on any kind of conversation.
Skype, however, has adaptive coding, that allows the voice quality to get worse and worse, whilst still maintaining the perception of a connection. Even though you may have a poor call, you can still maintain a conversation as you can here if you've missed a bit.
> I've tried using SIP over wobbly connections in far flung places.
As have I.
> The result is very crunchy calls with lots of (silent) dropouts.
Not for me, it isn't.
> Skype, however, has adaptive coding
SIP has the ability to use whichever codecs you want, as long as each endpoint agrees to use it. With transcoding proxies, you can often use whichever codec you ilke.
And you can change mid-call by way of the SIP Reinvite command. Any halfway-decent setup will do this as the error rate increases. One can only guess at why your trials apparently could not do this.
In short - if Skype can get a call through, SIP can get a call through.
Vic.
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Of course it's a small number, it's always a small number.
Even if it concerns 10 million people, it's a small number since Skype has hundreds of millions of subscribers.
That's the beauty of a large customer base : you can piss off millions at a time and keep saying that it's marginal with a straight face.
My wife's company and my friend's company. Also some users I know in continental Europe and South Africa.
Not that EVERY problem is necessarily related to the current issue bit I think it's quite widespread.
"Microsoft buys Skype and it all goes tits-up". Truth is it may have nothing to do with Microsoft at all, but it's what we're all thinking, isn't it?
Im getting pretty f***ing fed up of sky now, in adition to the now frequent downtime in recent weeks Ive had my account blocked and unblocked several times, been hacked(*) and had charges deducted from my paypal account and had software pushed to my desktop despite declining them permission to do so.
God knows how they ever thought they could corner the buisness VoIP market, their free service isn't even currently fit for purpose.
MY current go-to skype alternative for IP-to-POTS is magic-jacks dongle-free client, but this is pretty much US only.
*By "hacked" I mean I had apparently brought some credit and a call package to Jordan, which I promptly charged back through paypal.
Their support team refused to deviate from the script on this one so I got very few answers. But considering my account wasn't particularly badly abused (i.e. used to call premium rate numbers for hours on end) and that skype seems to have been having a curious issue of late where people can log into the forums using other peoples user-names, apparently at random, I am very much of the opinion that this was a fuck-up on their part.
"*By "hacked" I mean I had apparently brought some credit and a call package to Jordan, which I promptly charged back through paypal."
In all honesty more likely your issue - i.e. use a more secure password with Skype / Paypal or make sure your computer is not infected (keylogger etc.).