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Skype Slowly Restores Service To Users

CWmike writes "Skype continues to slowly recover after an outage caused by problems with its peer-to-peer interconnection system. The latest estimates say that 10 million users are now online, according to a blog post. Skype's outage began on Wednesday."

6 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Whatever went on... by Aerorae · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It totally classifies as epic fail.

  2. POTS vs VOIP by pinkfalcon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've worked in the telecom industry and I've seen the type of testing they do on their products, and I've worked in the software industry and I've seen the type of testing they do on their products...

    It will be a long long time before I give up my hardline from ATT and rely only on VOIP as my main contact with the world. or anything more than I'm bored - let's see who I can talk to....

    A LONG time....

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  3. Help Desk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Operator: Can I help you?
    Skype: YES, all of our peer-to-peer servers just went down. We have 23 million users offline right now.
    Operator: Have you tried turning it off and then turning it on again?

  4. Conspiracy Theory : by Beerdood · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sabotage by Comcast and AT&T. It's clear that they're scared that net neutrality bill is a big threat to business in the land line department... so the new plan is to make skype totally unreliable by sabotage. Eventually all the skype users will realize that VOIP is a bunch of crap and they'll go back to using land lines. It's so obvious!!

    /tinfoilhat

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  5. Re:Very serious this. by Lord+Byron+II · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's why there's Twitter: "@911, need help, was watching football game, now choking on a pretzel, my address is 1600 penn" [140 char maximum reached]

  6. PSTN vs independent VoIP by DragonHawk · · Score: 4, Informative

    Currently all POTS calls *are* VOIP calls!

    Good gods, how did *that* get modded "Informative"? (Yah, yah, pretend I'm new here.)

    POTS calls, by definition, start on a line with Plain Old Telephone Service. 48 volts, analog, more or less the same thing that's been in use for roughly a century now.

    Now, once you get to the CO, you're almost certainly going to go digital. That digital channel is still commonly pure TDM and circuit-switched (especially if you don't leave the exchange). You have a 64 Kbit/sec timeslice dedicated to your call all the way. Or it may go into an ATM network ("A technology that lets telephone companies turn your WAN problems into something they can tariff") and be cell-switched. Or, yes, it may go into a packet-switched IP network. Maybe even the Internet, if you're using a cheap LD carrier.

    But "all"?? No. Not by a long shot.

    Even if your call *does* go VoIP, you may still never leave the domain of the PSTN, where things like QoS can be enforced end-to-end. The Internet's generally a "unreliable, best effort" service. Different operators do different things, and all you can do is plug in somewhere and hope for the best. A telco deploying VoIP as a backhaul internally is a very different beast.

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