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A 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 use
by vxNsr 8y ago
A 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.
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoI said this downthread, but I'd happily put up with those quality issues (and I remember them, they were real!) in return for the reduced latency.
- Causality1 8y agoCurrent Skype still has those same issues. I'm lucky if I go a day without some bizarre "I can hear you but you can't hear me" type bug or a dropped call.