I am sure you have heard by now that Skype is out of service for more than 24 hours now. If you didn’t, then I suppose it is not of consequence for you. The speculation on the cause is all over the spectrum, but with no assurance on the accuracy. Of course, Skype being a Web 2.0 company has a blog where they mention the outage but offer no further explanation. For whatever reason I have the following imagery come to mind: The manufacturer of Tylenol pulling out the whole supply chain after poison tinged tablets were found in one town; the CEO of Union Carbide flying to India after Bhopal disaster; Bob Allen, then CEO of AT&T explaining the SS7 shutdown (nervously playing with a paper clip for added dramatic effect). I assume that any meaningful explanation of the outage will give further information on their internal architecture. Hence the conspicuous silence.
I think Skype and SkypeOut customers can easily and quickly find alternate means of communication. But SkypeIn customers have no such option. That is why I feel that Skype could have allowed their customers to forward SkypeIn calls to an alternate destination as identified by the user.
For those who are not commercially associated with Skype this should be a wake up call. It is foolhardy to depend on only one form of communication. This includes all those who want to throw out PSTN, just because it is not stupid enough. We should be greedy when it comes to different modes of communication.
Posted by aswath at August 17, 2007 11:34 AM
I can suggest an alternative - DAMAKA. I work Damaka (www.damaka.com)
Our application is P2P, SIP based, completely secure and most feature rich.
Some of the key features:
- Audio (Free P2P, DialIn, DialOut)
- Video (Free 1-to-1, VideoMail, VideoProfiles)
- 4-party Video COnferencing
- IM (with text to speech)
- Conferencing (Text, audio & video)
- IMConnectivity (Connect to MSN, Yahoo, AOL and GTalk from within damaka)
- Desktop, Application and File Sharing
- Whiteboarding
- Voicemail, SMS, Audio Streaming
- Mobile client
You can learn more about damaka by visiting:
http://www.damaka.com/
Download the client from:
http://www.damaka.com/download.htm
Feel free to contact me if you have any question. My damaka id: chandan
I can suggest an alternative - DAMAKA. I work for Damaka (www.damaka.com).
Our application is P2P, SIP based, completely secure and most feature rich.
Some of the key features:
- Audio (Free P2P, DialIn, DialOut)
- Video (Free 1-to-1, VideoMail, VideoProfiles)
- 4-party Video COnferencing
- IM (with text to speech)
- Conferencing (Text, audio & video)
- IMConnectivity (Connect to MSN, Yahoo, AOL and GTalk from within damaka)
- Desktop, Application and File Sharing
- Whiteboarding
- Voicemail, SMS, Audio Streaming
- Mobile client
You can learn more about damaka by visiting:
http://www.damaka.com/
Download the client from:
http://www.damaka.com/download.htm
Feel free to contact me if you have any question.
Chandan
Director
damaka, inc
damaka id: chandan
I believe that even things such as the forwarding of SkypeIn numbers relies on the DHT too (for storing the forwarding-to number), so they would need an alternative redundant place to store such data in an outage such as this, which is anathema to the religion :)
Posted by: David Beckemeyer at August 17, 2007 03:18 PMDavid:
I have to assume that they have the administrative record of ShypeIn users and the assigned PSTN number in a database outside of DHT; otherwise how can they recover from the current position. Given that information is available, they can allow SkypeIn users to enter their new PSTN number on a website, which their PSTN partner can use it to forward incoming calls. Since the call is kept outside of Skype, there is no reliance on DHT. Don't you think?
Posted by: Aswath at August 17, 2007 03:46 PM~
Great to know there are other alternatives to Skype like www.jajah.coma nd www.zoippe.com
!
Quote:
"It is foolhardy to depend on only one form of communication."
I would say: it is foolhardy for businesses to depend on a new and unproven form of communication that does not offer any form SLA :) I don't remember my good old POTS phone and all my contacts their phones being unavailable at the same time!
@Damaka: please stop spamming blogs you vulture!
Posted by: Buzz at August 19, 2007 08:10 AM