Nevertheless, I had to give Skype credit for at least trying to gather quality metrics. Maybe they'd see feedback similar to mine from other users and do something to improve the SkypeOut service for Australian destinations.

Then, in the closing months of 2007 and during all of 2008 so far, I've gained the distinct impression that for me the quality has definitely improved, and indeed to the point where the great majority of SkypeOut calls I make to Aussie destinations are pretty darn good (in many cases indistinguishable from making a regular landline call).

I've tried to contact Skype about this. I've formed a very negative impression of Skype's normal customer service support mechanism -- send an e-mail, get meaningless stock replies for the first few interactions, and subsequently carry out a fruitless to-an-fro e-mail dialog with s support person who may not get your point.

So I've tried to establish contact with any Skype manager responsible for SkypeOut. To date, my efforts have failed miserably. Even their local technical infrastructure provider has failed to get a customer support person to contact me. In this regard, Skype seem to be "too big for their boots" as the saying goes, just like many other large enterprises. They've got too many millions of customers to care much about me, I guess, so I can only make  comments based on my own suppositions.

I had partial success, and a "little bird told me" that the local Australian PSTN infrastructure for SkypeOut has remained basically the same since first installed, apart from some tweaking.

WHAT COULD HAVE CAUSED THE IMPROVEMENT? PLEASE READ ON ...