you pay peanuts
you get monkeys
What can you expect from a free phone service?
SkypeIn users are complaining of calls not coming in, with callers getting an unobtainable tone. The scale of the problem, and how long it's going to persist, isn't know, but users are reporting calls not being connected with no explanation and little response to on-line fault reports. It seems the lessons of previous outages …
Its worth delving a little deeper and asking how Sype connects to the real phone networks, landline and mobile- Whether they have proper workable agreements with contracts and SLA's in place for terminating their voip traffic or whether they might be doing it the cheaper way ?
Until I knew this i'd never consider buying any shares in them nor relying on them for my main business line....
"...especially as the traditional telcos don't seem to be providing a much better service these days."
How so? If a BT provided business line goes faulty then there ought to be a really serious problem for it not to get fixed the same day.
Telephone lines may not have much of a margin but they're still bread and butter business to "Traditional Telcos". It's unfair to suggest that standards are slipping to those of services such as Skype. Bear in mind that the majority of PSTN equipment is almost 25 years old and still working well for the most part, and will only be replaced in 2011 when 21CN is fully enabled.
It's funny. All of the tech companies have the worst phone lines these days. I guess it's because all of the technology related businesses love being on the bleeding edge but anytime I call another IT related business I prepare myself for garbled sound, frequent dropouts and delays that make carrying on a conversation very awkward at best. We're sticking with good old fashioned pots lines at our small business until VOIP is proven. It just works and keeps us from looking like a bunch of cheap techno-weanies to our customers.
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Should come as no surprise after all, it is owned by eBay!
I've been waiting a year, A YEAR! for eBay to sort out my account, which was hijacked, a phreakin year!!!
It is my worst CS experience to date and I never thought anyone would top my experience with Pipex.
That comment about you pay peanuts...you are presumably comparing Skype with a traditional telco, however, Skype had no infrastructure to build or maintain (servers aside), so should therefore be able to supply a service for peanuts.
Seriously, if you're going to rely on a service, which I'm 99% sure that says they dont guarantee any level of uptime, and NOT have a backup plan in case it goes wrong?
You deserve to loose the business. If your earning thousands of pounds relies on a phone, then you need to ensure its always there, and not pinch pennies.
The service is beta. They tell you this. Anyone who relies on it for a main line is stupid, and *cannot* complain when SkypeIn goes titsup.
Well, they can. Obviously. But we know who to shoot first when they open their gobs.
I'm not renewing my SkypeIn subscription for much the same reason, but I only got it as a bit of a laugh to see how it worked and stuff like that. It's difficult to link a fixed, traditional POTS number to something that can go online and offline so easily.
But yes, Skype CS sucks. Ebay CS sucks. While we're on the topic, PayPal CS sucks too. I wonder - is anything linking them all together?
Nope it isn't (I have skype and a Skypein number myself) but the point I am making is that whether you are using the free or paid for portions of the service, it utilises the same infrastructure which was originally designed to provide a free service whereas a traditional telco's infrastructure is designed to provide a paid for service and so they invest heavily in it because they know if it breaks down completely their customers will go elsewhere but there is no such pressure on Skype, particularly as its now owned by tatbay, err sorry ebay.
I wouldn't trust Skype to replace my home phone let alone use it to run a business.
Don't get me wrong, I love Skype Out. I get a years worth of unlimited calls to my friends and family for $30.
At that price I don't care if the service is down two days a year.
Actually what I am most afraid of is that they will start investing the money necessary to be 99.999% reliable.
Somehow I don't think they can afford to do that while still charging $30 a year.