John Dvorak Hypes Skype

Eh-Wire writes "John Dvorak gets all warm and fuzzy over Skype now that 30,000,000 users have registered for the free Internet telephony service. Dvorak extols the installation as, "smooth and elegant" and continues with, "Without any tweaking whatsoever it works immediately and works better than anything else I've used." Skype has appeared on the radar without pomp and fanfare and it doesn't look like it's going off screen any time soon."

Comments

How?

[mr100percent]

One thing I can't figure out is how Skype got so popular, when AIM Talk, Paltalk, Yahoo, and MSN all had voice chat features. Yahoo even had Karaoke rooms. Apple's iChat touted voice and video chat as one of its selling points for the OS.

So why did Skype do so well? Was it the marketing, or the catchy name? Or simple cross-platform compatibility? Or was it just a new brand?

One problem I've hit with skype is...

[Johnno74]

How it chooses the proxy to use if you're behind a firewall and can't accept incoming connections.

I'm in New Zealand, and when me & a friend in another part of NZ tried out skype, the connection was routed via another skype user in germany.

Some background: NZ is pretty much at the arse-end of the world, and national network traffic is very fast and reliable, but if you go out to the rest of the world you add in about 150 ms latency, each way.

Connections to europe are even worse, as the connection typically goes from NZ to the US west coast, then to the east coast, and then to europe. And back.
Although our network infrastructure here is very good, international bandwidth is expensive, so broadband connections have a monthly traffic limit, of 1-10gb per month, depending on your provider and plan. One bonus of the provider I use is only 1/10th of your national traffic counts towards your bandwidth allowance.

So here I was, thinking the voice quality is pretty good, but there were a few glitches (probably dropped packets etc), but there was a latency of close to one second, and this local call was using my precious international bandwidth. Other calls had similar results - the quality is basically hamstrung into the worst case scenario.

Skype is very good in that It Just Works, but its almost completely devoid of any configuration or logging that tells you what its doing behind the scenes. My router supports uPNP, but sykye didn't even seem to be making use of that to route calls directly to me.

Has anyone in NZ had similar results? Have these problems been improved since I last looked?

Re:Skype basically makes your PC a zombie

[cbiltcliffe]

That's not a zombie. That's a peer-to-peer node. Huge difference.

Remember that whole thing about how you can't shut down a P2P filesharing service when there's no central server? Well, there's no central server for Skype, either. That's how it can be a free service. If you use the service, you provide resources for managing the service. You don't pay for it in money....you pay for it in infrastructure.

I'd never even really thought of it like that before, either. Pretty simple concept, really....