But like the dog that didn't bark, the better lesson concerns another kind of silence. Skype claims nearly quarter of a billion registered users: amazingly few seem to have taken to the blogs and forums to complain. This underlines a fact of life that VoIP proponents are reluctant to discuss. Outside the world of managed business communications, VoIP is an adjunct to the plain old telephone service, not a replacement, and even then purely when it's free.
With things as they are, that is a profoundly sensible instinct for users to follow. It also makes it profoundly difficult to build a decent business model on pure VoIP: while Skype has added the usual frills of IM and video, it hasn't given users the one thing they can't do without — interoperability. Can any one VoIP provider afford enough infrastructure to approach telephonic standards of reliability for billions of users around the world? Certainly not. Could they work together to use each other's systems for redundancy, through open standards? That's what open standards are there for. That's how the internet works. That's the only way it will work.Source: opinion.zdnet.co.uk
VoIP provider Skype said Sunday that its network was "back to normal" after several days of sign-in difficulties. The company blamed a "massive restart" of user computers that occurred after a "routine set of patches" from Windows Update required users to re-boot their computers.
The updates and subsequent re-boots prompted "a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact," Skype wrote in a Monday morning blog post.
Though Skype can usually "self-heal" in situations like these, the re-boot shed light on a "previously unseen software bug" that crippled the self-heal function, Skype said.Source: pcmag.com
Perhaps the scariest part of the Skype problem is that whatever the cause, some Skype officials say the two-day outage was due, at least in part, by an external issue.
Nevertheless, Skype has been trying to build user volume on the business side, says Doug Williams, an analyst with Jupiter Research.Source: weblog.infoworld.com
Tags: denial-of-service attack | explanation | load management | Microsoft update | Network | Reboot | resource | Security | silence | Skype | Technology | testing | windows
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