Five times today this happened and it’s made me rethink if having Skype for a business line is a serious mistake. Is it stable enough? Or is it just my system that’s not stable? Lately we’ve been having trouble listening to our Skype voice mail and if we’re talking to somebody and somebody else calls in then it drops the call almost every time.

In the 2+ years I used Vonage I don’t remember any, although I’m sure there was at least one, dropped calls. It’s become a regular nuisance with Skype.

I did some checking around to see if others were reporting recent similar problems and came across an old post from Stuart Henshall from 2003 (too long ago) and the following article asking if Skype was good for business?:

Call quality and reliability have for the most part been acceptable. Lane uses a $25 USB headset from Plantronics. “I can probably think of about half a dozen times when we dropped calls or couldn’t carry on an intelligible conversation on Skype,” Lane says. “And most of those times, it was because we lost the Internet or power.”

This Skype forum post from August 29, 2006 has the user complaining that calls have been “dropping like flies.”

Anybody happen to have any good Skype links as to how to fix this problem? Is it something that is unique to a certain version of Windows? Or a conflict with another program perhaps? Could it be a problem with the USB device? We’ve already taken back one defective USB Skype phone and replaced it with a USB device where any phone can be plugged in. Again, it only seems to happen when we’re talking to somebody and somebody else calls in at the same time. And it’s not every time.

Suggestions? Solutions?

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