SkypeOut voice quality - Part 2

Tony Austin
Monday, 21 July 2008 08:53

Opinion and Analysis

SkypeOut enables you to make inexpensive voice calls from your PC to the switched telephone network, to destinations anywhere in the world. Some people think that the call quality is inadequate. I used to think this too, especially for calls originating within Australia, but my attitude has changed since then.

Last year, in SkypeOut Voice Quality - Part 1, I gave my impressions of the reliability and clarity of voice calls made from one's PC to the PSTN (public switched telephone network) using SkypeOut.

In summary, I had then been using SkypeOut since it was first made available in 2004. mainly to make calls from my office in Melbourne, Australia to customers and prospects overseas (mostly to the USA, and to a lesser extent Europe). I found that these calls were usually quite clear and rarely dropped out or had any other problems.

The echoing that was a minor issue in the early days seemed to get resolved by 2006/2007, and I enjoyed many trouble-free conversations. Essentially, the call recipients didn't realize that I wasn't using a regular landline to call them, and the 0.017 Euros per minute call rate for such destinations certainly was very attractive.

Yet for calls made to Australian destinations during 2006/2007 it was another matter. Generally, the voice clarity and connection reliability was fair, but I would rarely describe them as being good and hardly ever as being indistinguishable from using a regular landline service.

Usually calls made to Australian east coast mainland capitals (Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane) were fair enough. However, when I called elsewhere it seemed to be a lottery.

The worst ever were calls made to Coober Pedy, a famous opal-mining town in outback South Australia, a two hour flight northwest of Adelaide. I could only describe some of the calls made there as being like trying to converse underwater! Some calls made to northern Tasmania were not all that much better.

By the second half of 2007 I started asking myself if I should switch over to one of the regular VoIP providers, who presumably had industrial-strength QoS (quality of service) engineered into their networking infrastructure.

Such regular telco-like services would cost five to ten times as much as the two to three Euros per month that I'd been paying. Was it time for me to ditch SkypeOut, or should I persevere and see what happens?

PLEASE READ ON TO FIND OUT ...