The trouble with Skype

I've been using Skype for about a year now and although I haven't been a heavy user of it I've found enough of my friends use it to make it worthwhile keeping around. I've paid to be able to make outbound calls to the telecoms network and have only encountered two problems with voice quality.

Firstly I often get echo when the other person is not using a headset, i.e. they have a non-directional microphone and PC speakers. This is not really Skype's fault - its very hard to deal with - people should get a directional microphone that picks up only their voice, and they should use headphones unless they absolutely have to have "speakerphone behavior". That said various speakerphone manufactures have solved this problem, usually by some variation on making the connection singleplex and heavy echo cancellation.

Secondly there is much more delay on a Skype line over a long connection than I am used to with a phone line. This can result in higher than normal instances of interrupted speech and just a general feeling of disconnectedness. Again this isn't really Skype's fault - its a factor of the high latency on Internet connections between countries, we're talking 100-250ms (or sometimes more) from the west coast of the USA and mainland Europe. Which means when you pause for breath, if the other person starts it can easily be half a second or more before you hear them interrupt, which is often enough for you to have started talking again and interrupt them unintentionally. Then you get an experience like a packet collision on a shared medium network (ethernet or WiFi) - both talkers must back off and negotiate who starts speaking again. At that point you really notice the extra delay. In conversations with video support I've noticed this isn't such a big problem even though the delay is still there - you can give some little visual cues to help.

Like I said, neither of these problems is really Skype's fault, they are common to all VoIP and voice chat systems (Skype doesn't actually use VoIP) done via a computer over the general Internet. A really first class VoIP system should provide headsets (or great echo cancellation) and be able to tunnel long haul voice traffic over low-latency connections.

Finally my biggest issue with Skype that is Skype specific - their voice mail. If it wasn't for how limited Skype voicemail is I would certainly pay up the €30 a year for inbound Skype and start using it as my main "landline" phone number. Unfortunately Skype doesn't allow you to check voicemail by any other means than their client application which isn't much help if you're on the road just want to use a web browser to get voice mail, or have voice mail delivered to you as an attached file in email, or even just call into a regular phone number and check it. All of the above are available from other carriers like Vonage - Skype needs to catch up.

If there is one thing I really like about Skype, its their price - €30 a year for inbound Skype is way lower than the competition. True I still have to pay on top of that for outbound calls, but really I don't make that many outbound calls, and most of those are to 1-800 toll-free numbers. And the few toll calls I do need to make I tend to make by my cellphone since it has inclusive long distance minutes I need to use up. What I don't need is another subscription to a service like Vonage that charges at least $14.95 per month (more like €150 per year!) for their most limited service, forcing me to pay for 500 minutes of long distance calls a month that I'll never use.

I'm sure the packages that Vonage, Packet8 and others offer a good for some customers, otherwise they wouldn't buy them. However you have to ask yourself why a tech-savvy customer who would try VoIP as a landline replacement, is going to want to invest an extra $15 or much more a month to use it when they could just throw that money at their cellphone carrier to buy more minutes. To me the key sell of VoIP is that it follows your Internet connectivity, is highly integrated with Internet protocols for communication (email, web, and SIP) and that it doesn't cost you a penny when you're not using it. That point seems to have been missed by all VoIP offerings I've seen so far.

So the upshot is that until something happens to Skype voicemail or the service packages offered by Vonage et al I'm going to sit on the fence an only use Skype only for in-network chat and the occasional outbound call. The consequence is I don't get to exploit all the great features available and they don't get to exploit any of my hard earned Euros.