4 ms·

I remember good old Skype from like 3, 4 years ago that didn't use to suck at this so much, at least on the audio side. When the network connection was really b

I remember good old Skype from like 3, 4 years ago that didn't use to suck at this so much, at least on the audio side. When the network connection was really bad, it used something like phone quality, when it was good, the quality was closer to Face Time. You could hear the quality shift dynamically when network conditions were changing (i.e. someone starting a download). I really enjoyed talking on Skype back then, I knew I could depend on it and get the best I could, whatever the conditions were. Now it's much worse, the quality is average, it doesn't handle bad connections well and it doesn't fully utilize the good ones. I don't think we have anything as good now as we had back then. There's Team Talk which is amazing for audio, but much more cumbersome to set up.

ejcho623 8y ago
Why do you believe the quality is going backwards? Is there something they are optimizing for the compromise in quality?
- miki123211 7y ago
  not sure myself, I'm way out of my depth here, but a friend who knows much more about this sort of stuff, told me it's probably something to do with mobile connections. Apparently slow landline connections and bad cellular connections like 3G are unreliable in different ways. Also most mobile phones, definitely all iPhones, not sure about Android, can't go higher than 16kHz when it comes to audio calls, so anything better is pointless. Maybe it's just M$ and trying to save some pennies on the infra, especially that they're not p2p any more (also b/c mobile connections and restrictive NATS). I know They're supposedly not that bad any more, but considering what they've done to Skype's other aspects, I wouldn't be surprised really.