Skyping between Australia and UK

[pikey]

We frequently Skype between Australia and UK and find the performance quite variable. We have about a 10mb connection locally and don't suffer problems with internet connectivity in general.

Sometimes the picture and audio is excellent, sometimes so poor it keeps dropping.

We've used Skype between family for about 5 years and never experienced this before. Is this just the way Skype works from so far away, the ISP's international bandwidth, any throttling issues, or something else?

Any tips or suggestions? Thanks

Ben

[RobCrezz]

Can be down to the connection at the other end. Can also be down the what route your data takes to the person in Australia, nothing you can do about this, its the nature of the internet - there could be a heavily worked router or a data connection at high capacity on the route that your data is taking.

[jeremyc]

Could be upload rather than download performance of your connection - is it 10Mb both ways?

The Skype help provides instructions to test the connection for a call (as well a guidelines of the bandwidth requirements for different calls):
- select contact to call in contact list.
- in call window click Check Settings button.
- in the connection tab click Test Now.

After all of that, it could quite possibly be bandwith shaping/throttling by your connection provider.

[pikey]

Bit of background to this.. we lived in London, Skyping family in Devon and Staffordshire. Now we've moved to Australia and are now Skyping the same destinations in Devon and Staffordshire.

Previously it was 100% reliable and good quality and now it's unreliable

[crmcatee]

Have you got the latest updates on both machines ?

[pikey]

crmcatee said:

Have you got the latest updates on both machines ?

[zac510]

Internet in Australia is terrible. and worse if you are using a 3G dongle.

If you are using the webcam then turn it off, it saves on the bandwidth.

[Paul 2000]

My daughter is in Adelaide and I'm in France. We were having lots of poor quality Skype calls - pixelation, frozen pic, iffy sound quality. It may be coincidence, but since she added openDNS numbers to her network prefs the quality of calls have been hugely improved. She was having the same problem Skyping friends in the UK and it seems to have fixed those. Worth a try.

http://www.opendns.com/
http://www.labnol.org/internet/tools/opendsn-what-...

[onlynik]

It's not an apple device is it?

My fathers connection to his ipad/iphone are awful compared to his PC, the IOS devices are always laggy.

I frequently speak to the wife on Skype via low bandwidth high latency links with very few issues.

[The_Jackal]

You say you have a 10Mb connection, what does speedtest.net say?
You could also get the other end in Aus to do the same, that might tell you a bit about why it is patchy.
Take note of the ping as well as that could affect things if it is abnormally high.

[durbster]

Whereabouts in Oz are you? It's rather a big place so connection quality will vary

[LordGrover]

said:

Bit of background to this.. we lived in London, Skyping family in Devon and Staffordshire. Now we've moved to Australia and are now Skyping the same destinations in Devon and Staffordshire.

Previously it was 100% reliable and good quality and now it's unreliable

Mostly, the distance between London and Devon and Oz and Devon is rather greater. Greater distance often means more hops so more opportunities for something to go wrong. S'life I suppose.

[pikey]

onlynik said:

It's not an apple device is it?

Devices in use / have been variable between Windows7, Ubuntu, Mac 10.7, iPad 2, Samsung Smart TV.

And to the earlier question, yes all updates applied

[pikey]

The_Jackal said:

You say you have a 10Mb connection, what does speedtest.net say?

It's not the connection speed, as Skype will work quite well with about 0.5

Even doing a SpeedTest with a UK server, I get about 3mb

[pikey]

Paul 2000 said:

My daughter is in Adelaide and I'm in France. We were having lots of poor quality Skype calls - pixelation, frozen pic, iffy sound quality. It may be coincidence, but since she added openDNS numbers to her network prefs the quality of calls have been hugely improved. She was having the same problem Skyping friends in the UK and it seems to have fixed those. Worth a try.

http://www.opendns.com/
http://www.labnol.org/internet/tools/opendsn-what-...

Thanks, will try

[pikey]

Ok, so have done some more testing.

OpenDNS didn't make a difference, but I thought of something else. I got a VPN connection through to the UK and this gave me the following:


Did a further Skype test through this VPN and it's fine.

So the problem is with how Skype moves its data across long distances, rather than distance itself.

[lestag]

said:

Ok, so have done some more testing.

OpenDNS didn't make a difference, but I thought of something else. I got a VPN connection through to the UK and this gave me the following:


Did a further Skype test through this VPN and it's fine.

So the problem is with how Skype moves its data across long distances, rather than distance itself.

ping and packet loss is more important for audio/video, try pingtest.net

[iphonedyou]

We have 40mb (25mb actual having accounted for wireless, etc) with a ping around 30 and still find the performance can be terrible when skyping with my brother in Oz. But that's nothing to do with our connection; his is terrible - he uses a 3g dongle.

So it's the other end causing the issue. Although our upload is 10mb; yours, at 0.68, must account for PART of the problem, surely. If it's 0.68, what's to say it's not dropping below 0.5 at times during the call.

[shtu]

Yep, get both ends to place a Skype test call, and check the quality.

You may be able to help a bit by turning down the resolution of your\their webcam if possible. Lots of fairly cheap cameras do "HD" resaolutions - 1280x720, which is complete overkill for a freebie video call, especially over 3G or some rural aussie ADSL.

Now, this *might* be possible within Skype, but it used to just take the native resolution of the camera and use that, which then involved some registry tweaking to adjust, so look into how that's adjusted. (don't use skype much myself)

Edited by shtu on Thursday 2nd August 10:48

[Bob the Planner]

95% off the time I get a good connection from NSW to Leicestershire/Derbyshire. Little pixelation or dropout. It can be time of day dependent too. Seems much better Aus evening/UK morning than the other way round. Maybe more bandwidth in the UK evening is an issue and its normally the UK end which is the problem as a Sykpe to QLD just after is fine.