poor quality skype ?

pennymakespounds

every day for long time now , very poor picture blurred & pixellated , and losing sound sometimes ..... when skyping partner few hundred miles away , also in uk .

We've both got fairly new decent laptops .

my bb runs at 20000kb , hers at 3000.

Anything i can do about it ?

What is it that actually determines how good or bad the picture quality is like ?

thanks

System

I've noticed skype getting worse in the last wee while too, I get big pauses in conversations where the other side can't hear me - sometimes it returns to normal but other times it drops the call - I spoke to them but tbh they were useless, all they said was that I had to get the latest version! (which I had) be interested if anyone has advice for improving it

Mr_Toad

pennymakespounds wrote: »

every day for long time now , very poor picture blurred & pixellated , and losing sound sometimes ..... when skyping partner few hundred miles away , also in uk .

We've both got fairly new decent laptops .

my bb runs at 20000kb , hers at 3000.

Anything i can do about it ?

What is it that actually determines how good or bad the picture quality is like ?

thanks

It could be your ISP throttling the bandwidth available to Skype, it's called traffic shaping and is a tool used by ISPs to prevent certain types of traffic grabbing bandwidth.

Most ISPs commonly throttle Peer to peer file sharing, or video downloads. It could be one or both ISPs have decided that Skype is causing them issues.

One of the issues, not often spoken about by the ISPs, is that most ISPs are also telephony companies and it doesn't take a genius to work out that people using Skype or other VoIP services are using them for 'free' calls. Calls that the ISP would rather you made over the paid for phone networks.

As Skype and other VoIP becomes more popular this is likely to become more widespread.

Have a read of this article on this very subject.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/16/eu_regulator_reports_on_euro_operators_traffic_management_policies/