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Garreth McDaid
Asked: 2014-04-16 05:23:21 +0800 CST

Should Skype be reliable in a corporate environment?

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I have been managing the IT function in a small software development company that has grown from 10 users to 70 users in 5 years.

Most users in the company are office based, but some key users work remotely.

At the beginning, Skype become the de facto tool for communicating between office bound and remote workers. As the company has grown, and more remote workers have been added Skype has become part of the ecosystem of the company.

In the last 18 months Skype reliability has deteriorated. I had initially attributed this to issues with a certain ISP, but in the interim we have moved offices contracted with a completely different ISP, increased our synchronous fibre broadband (20mbps), and installed new network hardware.The Skype issues however remain.

The standard complaint form remote users is that when they talk to their friends, mothers, wives, etc Skype is fine, but when they talk to someone in the office, they frequently get drops, pixelation, and muffling.

After having tried to resolve this over 2 years I'm beginning to wonder if Skype is an appropriate tool for this environment. All of the company's infrastructure is cloud based, so there is a constant data flow in and out of the office which will obviously peak from time to time. We're also Apple based, so there is constantly stuff downloading from iTunes often on multiple systems at the same time.

Also, there could be multiple Skype VC calls going on at the same time. We generally see issues in the morning between 09:00 and 11:00 when we have stand up meetings all of which involve remote developers.

Whenever we get these problems we increase the broadband by 5mbps which makes things better for a few months then we get some more staff, and then it starts again.

My theory is that these inevitable peaks which you generally won't get on a residential connection, are impacting on Skype audio and video. With the company IT profile as is making something like Skype work consistently is going to be virtually impossible. Maybe a dedicated internet connection for Skype would be a solution?

networking

2 Answers

  1. Whenever we get these problems, we increase the broadband by 5mbps, which makes things better for a few months, and then we get some more staff, and then it starts again.

    My theory is that these inevitable peaks, which you generally won't get on a residential connection, are impacting on Skype audio and video, and while the company IT profile is at it is, making something like Skype work consistently is going to be virtually impossible unless we have a dedicated internet connection for Skype.

    Is this a valid theory?

    That's pretty subjective troubleshooting. You should spend the time to get hard data about your networks (from the edge to the client), especially during times when the audio/video is poor.

    You should also look into deciding how you want to use Skype or any IM tool. Most allow you to set your "quality" so that you can decide to not push HD video when it simply isn't necessary. Those kinds of tweaks might help you.

    Skype and other solutions like Lync, Jabber, etc. especially when used across your edge connection with your ISP could be subject to degradation since you can't control QoS worth anything. Internal IM/video collaboration is better, but still can have minor issues even across large bandwidth connections.

    Should Skype be reliable in a corporate environment?

    In the end, your company has to decide what solution works well for it. Skype itself isn't the issue here, no more than any IM client would be.

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  2. Best Answer

    I've done quite a bit of research on this over the last month or so.

    My conclusion is that unless you use the Skype Tools for Active Directory, or are in a position to use a Proxy server for all your Internet traffic, Skype is not a good corporate solution.

    This is because Skype performance cannot be guaranteed in environments using Port Address Translation

    http://www.nightbluefruit.com/blog/2014/05/is-skype-an-appropriate-tool-in-corporate-environments/

    Quote from Skype Administrators Guide:

    2.2.4 Relays

    If a Skype client can’t communicate directly with another client, it will find the appropriate relays for the connection and call traffic. The nodes will then try connecting directly to the relays. They distribute media and signalling information between multiple relays for fault tolerance purposes. The relay nodes forward traffic between the ordinary nodes. Skype communication (IM, voice, video, file transfer) maintains its encryption end-to-end between the two nodes, even with relay nodes inserted.

    As with supernodes, most business users are rarely relays, as relays must be reachable directly from the internet. Skype software minimizes disruption to the relay node’s performance by limiting the amount of bandwidth transferred per relay session.

    ie regardless of what bandwidth you have, when using PAT, you will still be dependent on resources over which you have no control.

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