7 ms·
> To my ears, 2010-era Skype had lower latency than any of the modern VOIP systems in use today (including Skype). Yeah! What happened?
by TomMarius 8y ago
> To my ears, 2010-era Skype had lower latency than any of the modern VOIP systems in use today (including Skype).
Yeah! What happened?
- mrguyorama 8y agoSkype went from point to point systems to routing through a server backend.
- solarkraft 8y agoAny idea why? Sounds stupid, considering latency losses and increased server costs.
- dymk 8y agoHole punching through routers. It's hard to generically connect two NAT'd devices directly. It's simpler to route through a central server.
- kitotik 8y agoHasn’t this been a solved problem for a while with STUN / TURN servers? The centralized server just handles the negotiation, so that the p2p clients can do their thing.
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoI don't recall this ever being a problem with Skype, and I used it quite extensively at the time. (Mumble is another matter...)
- oarsinsync 8y agoSkype's original USP was that it resolved the NAT issues that plagued SIP based VOIP implementations, exactly by performing hole punching through routers (I suspect just UDP hole punching)
- api 8y agoThis isn't that hard. It's even easier now that many people have IPv6. IPv6 still usually requires rendezvous due to stateful fireballing but it otherwise behaves like 1:1 NAT. (IPv6 is occasionally deployed with NAT, but in that case it is 1:1 NAT without port remapping which is also P2P-friendly.)
- fredley 8y agoSo that the data can be captured, analysed, etc.
- ArchReaper 8y agoSo the NSA could listen in.
- edf13 8y agoCompliance
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoWell, it happened around the same time Microsoft bought the company. That's not an answer per se, but probably had something to do with it. 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.
- JaumeGreen 8y agoProbably one of two reasons. 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.
- rrdharan 8y agoSurprised no one mentioned the documented reason: the VirnetX parent lawsuits, which were also why Apple had to stop using P2P in FaceTime. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/04/after-200m-patent-settlement-with-microsoft-virnetx-sues-for-more/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/04/after-200m-patent-se...
- TomMarius 8y agoApparently patents in this form need to be abolished ASAP. Human society can't afford anything like this standing in the way of widespread usage of such well known and well available technologies. Please, let's all go and short that patent troll.
- 0xCMP 8y agoApparently that troll also forced changes to Apple's handling of on-demand VPNs: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/04/apple-says-vpn-changes-coming-in-ios-thanks-to-virnetx-verdict/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/04/apple-says-vpn-chang...
- sandov 8y agoIMO, all patents need to be abolished ASAP. They're a bad idea to begin with, and this case is just particularly ridiculous. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
- takeda 8y agoMaybe for technology. The patents are still somewhat useful outside IMO. The whole idea about patent was that you could enjoy temporary monopoly in exchange of disclosing information about your invention. 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.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
- r1ch 8y agoIn the online gaming space, Skype used to be a big enabler of DDoS attacks due to its P2P nature. Almost everyone used Skype back before we had Discord and other alternatives, and there were plenty of sites that you could paste in someone's name and have their IP in seconds. Even if they weren't online, Skype servers cached a bunch of previously seen IPs. Then they would paste that into a $5/mo "stress test" tool and the victim gets a short DDoS (1-5 minutes) but enough to disrupt / kick them out of the game.
- nyolfen 8y agothis was done well after skype stopped using p2p routing
- gsich 8y agoPrimary reason not to use Skype back then. Ts/Ventrilo existed longer than Skype however. So a money issue then? But public servers were/are available too.
- agret 8y ago> Almost everyone used Skype back before we had Discord and other alternatives 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.
- redskull 8y agoSee....Skype has had PTT...They've always had it...Discord is the biggest garbage app ever created It will NEVER be ANYWHERE close as good as mumble or hell even teamspeak
- vxNsr 8y agoA lot of people are giving legal reasons but there were real technical ones as well in 2011 that forced the migration. 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.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoThis alone doesn't explain why couldn't they leave the "super node" infrastructure in, with an extra bit of code ensuring mobile users are never designated as "super nodes". This way, quality would remain the same for the desktop/laptop users, instead of being degraded for everyone.
- Cyph0n 8y agoNot to mention that supernodes, though fewer in number, could still help reduce latency for those on mobile.
- imhoguy 8y agoThe switch from crowdsourced supernodes was mostly about link quality with: - 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.
- 8y ago
- runn1ng 8y agoMobile phones.
- arminiusreturns 8y agoSo Microsoft ol buddy the NSA could gobble all that data from a central point.
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoFor Skype specifically, I noticed latency get worse around the same time Microsoft switched from P2P to dedicated servers.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- squarefoot 8y ago3 letter agencies demanding access to private conversations happened, so this is very likely the result of all traffic being routed in a more centralized and less efficient way.
- fineoldcannibal 8y agoIf it can negotiate a peer to peer connection, it still does and it's the preferred route. It's only in the case that there are firewalls, certain types of NATs etc that the calls is hairpinned via a server.
- takeda 8y agoP2P vs using central servers. This is all thanks to NAT. Skype had very creative functionality to pierce through NAT.
- black-tea 8y agoOne thing is just the significantly higher latency on consumer/business Internet connections. ISPs all optimised for bandwidth, not latency. They don't market latency. This is thanks to things like packet interleaving. Back in the early 2000s it wasn't uncommon to get a sub 10ms round trip to a server in the same country. Now you'll be lucky to get sub 30ms. So we get things like HD video of the person's head bobbing around, but can't actually have an enjoyable conversation with them.
- yrro 8y agoThe distributed architecture was not conducive to spying on users.