Skype went from point to point systems to routing through a server backend.
In fairness, Skype seems to be a lot more "stable" now than it once was. I recall having to frequently restart calls due to the audio suddenly crapping out in a variety of odd ways. That seems to happen much less often now. Can't say for sure if the two are related, but it would make sense.
But, I'd take a VOIP system with decreased latency over stability any day. Particularly since the problems could almost always be fixed by restarting the call.
1. Control. They would control the medium, an thus have full control over the communication. Maybe even apply wiretapping if needed.
2. Anonymity. P2P usually means that you know the address of the other participants, with a central server you don't get to know their address. Professionals might need this extra layer of protection.
The centralized server just handles the negotiation, so that the p2p clients can do their thing.
(Mumble is another matter...)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/04/after-200m-patent-se...
Please, let's all go and short that patent troll.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
For example thanks to patents we have generic version of medication, instead of them being trade secrets. Yes I know there are other things like drug approval that requires disclosing this information but that works together with patents.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221256711...
It's a subtle but important distinction: money of any kind is a tool, existing for a valid purpose; otherwise inert.
Accumulating money in a manner viewing it as a score versus others easily leads to looking down on those who have less, and to practices that optimize return over anything else. This can dehumanize others in the eyes of a money lover.
That sounds like good patent troll. Did they create any product using the patented technology or just Sue everyone?
Yeah except for when gaming, Skype "always on" voice was very annoying for any games and the latency was way higher than Mumble or Teamspeak so we would use those for our gaming groups but Skype for person-to-person calls rather than group chats.
I guess if you didn't have anyone technical enough to setup a Teamspeak or Mumble server in your gaming group YMMV but they were 1000% better than using Skype which had worse quality audio, no push to talk and huge latency.
When skype was first launched 95% of users were on desktop or laptops that basically never got disconnected. Skype leveraged this by designating some users as "super nodes" that basically acted as the backhaul servers that eventually replaced them.
This worked well until mobile phones became prevalent and began to outnumber desktop and laptops on the network.
Mobile phones have two issues:
1) They aren't always on/connected so can't be used as "super nodes," especially because even today mobile phones suck at mulit-tasking, but were even worse back then.
2) Even if 1 wasn't an issue the short battery life of mobile phones meant that they wouldn't last very long.
At a certain point it became impossible to support the increased number of phones with the current infrastructure choices. So they moved to something else.
- asymetric links (ADSL)
- WiFi
- usage-based plans
- people shutting Skype down on varous occassions,
- suspended laptops,
- bandwidth competing applications (video).
I remember past Skype had lot of quality issues, sometimes connection was very choppy, dropped unexpectedly, or took long time to establish.