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by calbear81 4434 days ago
Yeah, I don't know what the heck is wrong with Skype either. On video calls, the quality is lacking most of the time and even though we're both on fast broadband connections, the "call quality" is still a 3 out of 5 bars. Switch to Google Hangouts and everything works fine with a lot less connectivity issues.
1 comments
innoying 4434 days ago
The problem is Skype recently moved to a centralized infrastructure instead of a P2P which has caused terrible issues for pretty much everybody. Allegedly this was done to allow the NSA to snoop on conversations easier.
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astrange 4434 days ago
Allegedly according to whom?

P2P infrastructure isn't realistic when most of your clients are on mobile. Skype used to drain your battery simply by logging in for an hour. Now it doesn't!

Skype and G+ use the same codec families as well, so the differences would be in bandwidth allocation.

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skeletonjelly 4433 days ago
It wasn't P2P for everyone, they had "servers" in the P2P network called supernodes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_protocol#Peer-to-peer_ar...

The battery drain could be from anything. I'm not sure if they use GCM (Google Cloud Messaging) to reduce battery these days but without looking at the code I don't think you could say switching to a centralised server model fixed the battery issues.

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