Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who has had terrible experience with Skype?

I live in New York but my family is from Australia so I use video-calling them to them all the time. I've tried using Skype but basically it's terrible. Poor audio, choppy frame rates and at some point it will start giving messages about "degraded performance" and we'll lose video.

My setup is a 50Mbps cable line using wireless (N) from a Macbook Pro. The other end is ADSL of varying degrees (1.5 to 10Mbps) on wireless (N) from a Windows PC or laptop.

We've basically given up on using Skype.

What works flawlessly and with much higher quality? Facetime.

Am I really the only one who has had terrible experience with Skype?

My point with this is that Skype is not the dominant video medium it once was, especially not from a technical standpoint.

What's more, video calling is becoming a commodity. I think we're near or above 100M Facetime-capable devices (iPhones, iPod Touches and Macs). Google Talk is available to however many millions of GMail users are out there.

Skype isn't even a strong business (IMHO). Most consumers don't pay, which leaves the business type users who use multiway calling I guess. But where p2p video calling is becoming commoditized, who's to say multiway calling won't quickly follow suit?

Basically, $8.5B for Skype is nuts.

It seems the one who really needed to buy Skype was Facebook who have no video calling to speak of. One wonder if Skype was "the last piece of chocolate cake" syndrome, meaning you want something you otherwise wouldn't just because it's the last piece.

Australia has small and expensive pipes to the rest of the world, and it shows up as caps and high prices. I'd be surprised if Australian telcos weren't working hard to degrade VoIP generally.

For my own part, I use Skype for almost every outgoing phone call. I spend perhaps 5 GBP/month on threshold auto-credit. The biggest problems with it happen with concurrent upload activity, especially torrents.

This was true 10 years ago but a lot has changed and it's fairly damning evidence of just how much the US has stood still on Internet access in the last decade.

Consider iiNet, Australia's third largest ISP:

http://www.iinet.net.au/broadband/plans.html

200GB/month ADSL2+ for $50/month (+$30/month "phone tax"). In NY I have Time Warner Cable 50Mbps but it's basically capped at 250GB and I think I pay $80/month for it.

But there are three important advantages Australia has in this regard:

1. The caps are known and advertised. In the US they are far more surreptitious;

2. You get what you pay for. If you pay for 200GB, you get 200GB. There is no hiding behind "fair use" or nebulous definitions of "unlimited". This also means that a low traffic user can pay as little as $30/month for their ADSL2+ connection. Nor do you get labelled a bandwidth hogged and get transferred to some incredibly oversubscribed network if you dare to download (common practice in the UK); and

3. If you wish, you can pay for and get 1TB+/month. Where I am, my only choices are TWC and crappy ADSL1 providers. If I wanted >250GB/month I couldn't get it.

And all this is the current system. Australia is in the early stages of rolling out FTTH (fibre to the home) for ~95% of the population with structural separation between providing wholesale and retail services.

So I wouldn't be too quick to crow about Internet advantages in the US over Australia (or anywhere really).

But if the overseas pipes are the bottleneck, improved local infrastructure would mean more are fighting to use them.

This is not the case. barrkel's statement is outdated and inaccurate.

"Each of the four networks that will be providing the bulk of international connections for Australia is capable of carrying at least a terabit per second of data. The total international capacity in use for the Australian market in 2009 is estimated to be around 300 gigabits per second. Accordingly, total capacity usage could double, then double again, then double again, and then double yet again before the capabilities of those networks was exhausted. It would therefore be difficult to say that international networks are a capacity bottleneck in the Australian market."[1]

Another cable link currently under construction will double Australia's current capacity. [2]

[1] http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/358578/nbn_101_float...

[2] http://www.techworld.com.au/article/354838/aus_network_bandw...

Higher speeds seem a lot more ubiquitous in the US as opposed to here though. I live in one of the largest cities in the country, and my choices are dial-up, ADSL (to an exchange 5+km away), or cable from a single provider (who charges relatively highly for their services). From what I can see, the US appears to be much better in this regard.

I have family who are on 2GB plans for $50/mo, and they regard that as fairly good. The reason we're rolling out a (government-owned) broadband network is because we need it.

I have family who are on 2GB plans for $50/mo, and they regard that as fairly good.

That's not good at all. I suspect that's the Telstra BigPond "ignorance tax" package. Almost any provider will give them a better deal.

Eg, I get 30Gb/month on Internode for $40. (I live in Australia)

I'd recommend looking at iiNet and Internode packages for them.

>> I have family who are on 2GB plans for $50/mo, and they regard that as fairly good.

> Eg, I get 30Gb/month on Internode for $40. (I live in Australia)

Is one of you talking about bandwidth (and types 2GB instead of 2Gb) and the other talking about data quota?

Sorry, no, that was a mistyping on my part. I meant GB.

Here's the Internode plans: http://www.internode.on.net/residential/adsl_broadband/easy_... (I actually don't have one of those plans, but you can see the 30GB for 39.95 unbundled).

And I suspect this is the plan the OP was referring to: http://go.bigpond.com/broadband/9-plan/ (Unbundled it's $39.95 for 2GB)

Telstra Bigpond used to sell the same plan with no bundling discount. It wouldn't surprise me if some people are still on it.

AFAIK no one in Australia caps on speed, except in special circumstances. You get ADSL as fast as it can go up to your data cap, and then it slows.

I'm in Melbourne and I've just got unlimited adsl2+ for $50 pm. Last plan was 40gb adsl2+ for $60.

Skype (video & skype-2-phone) usually works very well (not always, but lately usually better than land lines for overseas calls).

I lived in China and regularly had to contact people in Europe. I tried a lot of things, but in the end, Skype was the best overall experience, far better than Google Voice, especially in video. I had a fairly low bandwidth (3 MBps), but quality was fine.

When I try to call land lines in New Zealand, I consistently get an extremely poor connection.

You get that talk delay which can totally ruin conversation flow.

The internet in NZ pretty bad but it surely can't be that bad. It's kinda made me think about putting on tin foil hat and think there's some kind of Telecom [monopoly telecoms company in nz] shady service degradation going on.

I make regular Skype video calls from Perth Australia to by brother in Mountain View and the video and audio quality is excellent. We both have decent but not stellar bandwidth (~4Mb/sec at my end) but I think it also comes down to having good hardware.

> 50Mbps cable line using wireless (N) from a Macbook Pro.

The folks at FLOSS Weekly recommend interviews to be conducted over cabled networks. You may want to try it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com