December 27, 2006
Digging Into The Skype Protocol
Nuno at 21Talks reveals a bit about the inner workings of Skype. I've speculated before, but he confirms that Skype uses UDP (User Datagram Protocol), a connectionless protocol, instead of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). This backs up my previous speculation as to why Skype sometimes has crappy voice quality: data packets can arrive in which order they want to. TCP, on the other hand, orders packets going in and coming out. So if there are network problems, Skype will exhibit the "warbled" voice phenomenon. This could also happen if free RAM and/or processing cycles on your computer are low, resulting low quality VoIP calls.
It might be due to the holiday season, but my cable connection has been especially horrible for over two weeks now. While I've only used Skype for VoIP during this period, I'm hazarding a guess that any VoIP service is suffering some sort of problems.
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