Skype Outage Not Over

Skype initially said its outage is over, but that clearly is not the case everywhere, and we are nearing 24 hours since the log-in problem began. Now Skype warns that the outage is likely to continue through Friday. My U.S. log-in still hangs.

The service had been sporadic but gradually improving during the business day in Asia on Friday, some report.

"There are about 2.5 million people logged in right now, where normally there would be over 8 million, and it's been going on and off every 10 minutes," says Mark Main, senior analyst at Ovum in London.

You may draw your own conclusions about which other application or service providers might benefit, but urges to gloat should generally be suppressed. Nobody whose service uses IP and the public networks is safe from outages or service disruptions.

That's why businesses and networks have redundancy. People who scream and yell about losing their service have only themselves to blame if they didn't build some level of diversity and redundancy even into their personal communications. Use Skype, other IM applications, mobiles, POTS-replacement VoIP, and POTS, email and anything else you can get your hands on. Some of us use multiple mobiles from different providers and multiple broadband providers. But never hang everything on any one service or provider, especially if your business depends on it. Personally, I wouldn't even hang my personal communications on a "single provider" strategy.

Dark Skype

Skype Ltd. early today blamed an unspecified "software problem" for an outage that might make the service unavailable for as long as 24 hours. At 9 a.m. EDT Skype said the outage might last 12 to 24 hours.

Most people are finding it impossible to dial out or open an instant message session with any of their contacts. A "Connecting" message just hangs.

Skype rarely goes offline. The last reported outage resulted in the service going dark for several hours in October 2005.

Fred Pitts Back in Service with TeleBlend

It took 10 days, but TeleBlend customer Fred Pitts FINALLY is back in service.
"My first try to call home this morning continued with the "fast busy" signal; by midmorning, however, it was working," Pitts says. "So, while disappointed to have been without incoming service for such a length of time, I am thankful today that I am back up. I hope everyone else will be back in service soon as well."

A gracious comment, I'd say. At least some disgruntled SunRocket customers who picked TeleBlend as a replacement say they have churned to other providers such as Packet8 and Vonage.

A harrowing experience, to be sure. Perhaps it is only fair to note, though, that of the 60,000 transitioned customers, nearly all made the flash cut without much apparent disruption. Call it 99 percent. But one percent of 60,000 is still 600 customers, and it will be scant comfort to know that (hypothetically) 54,000 customers had no real issues.

That's the devil with mass market services, though, isn't it? Getting 99 percent of things right still generates thousands of trouble tickets (I'm not suggesting TeleBlend had issues with as many as one percent of its accounts, by the way. Just making the point that a very small failure rate in a mass market application or service can result in huge trouble ticket queues.)

Skype apparently still is having a major outage itself today, and as older posts today note, at&t and Cisco have had issues this month as well. S*** happens even to companies as large and sophisticated as Cisco and at&t.

And Cisco Goes Down, Also...

Cisco's main www.cisco.com page was offline at 11 a.m. Pacific Time on Aug. 8 and stayed offline for more than two and a half hours. It returned at about 1:45 p.m. The outage was an unintended byproduct of routine maintenance.

at&t EDGE Network Outage

See what we mean? AT&T Inc. acknowledged a brief outage of its EDGE network Tuesday, Aug. 14, which was blamed on routine router maintenance. The EDGE network was also down on July 2 for about six hours.

EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) is the wide area wireless network that services iPhones and many other devices, providing data service but also carrying voice traffic over the GSM protocol.

Voice Quality is Getting Worse: What Would You Expect?

Those of use who grew up with one phone company got spoiled by the reliability and quality of its communications network (despite "customer service" so bad it became an oxymoron)," says technology journalist Mark Stephens, whose pen name is Robert X. Cringely. "Those of us trying to save a few bucks by piggy-backing voice services on the Internet are starting to get what we've paid for."

Skype itself now is experiencing an outage that might take 12 to 24 hours to fix (Aug. 16).

There's a larger trend at work here, and it happens in virtually all formerly highly-regulated businesses when deregulation and new technology hit. Remember when airlines were highly regulated, and could not compete on the basis of price? How did they compete? Amenities and other non-price differentiators. Of course, prices were high and not that many people flew.

Deregulation hits and all of a sudden price becomes a key competitive weapon. Of course, when people start paying lots less, something has to give. Like amenities. But more people fly now.

So here's the problem communications service provider executives face: they can't afford to run "gold plated networks" for the same reason airlines cannot. Obsessive concern about voice quality and service availability are one thing in a highly regulated environment. Such concern is quite something else in a highly competitive marketplace where customers in fact choose to pay money for service that is quite a bit less intensive than it once was.

In a nutshell, the business problem is that operators cannot afford to maintain the same obsessive levels of quality when customers demonstrably don't care. Mobile communications is the best example. Everybody uses mobile service. And everybody knows it simply is not as reliable as wired phone service. Nor is the audio quality as good. But it's a wild success, anyway.

If people will not pay you to maintain a higher quality of service, can you afford to do it? That's the problem the global communications business faces. People are voting with their pocketbooks: buying services with lesser quality on some metrics because the overal utility of mobility is so high.

In other cases, such as over the top VoIP, they are voting with their wallets to buy cheaper services with less reliable service.

Get used to it. In virtually every deregulated, formerly monopolistic industry, overall quality will drop. Of course, there's another trend as well. New, higher cost alternatives will develop. Because some people need high quality enough to pay for it.

IP communications are very valuable. They are very useful. But they are not as robust as the old public switched network, if only because of things like latency. The services can be made more rugged, of course. It just costs money.

HNS Launches SpaceWay Satellite

Hughes Network Systems has successfully launched and deployed its new Spaceway satellite, expected to enable high-speed IP data networking across North America at rates of from 512 Kbps up to 16 Mbps upstream and as fast as 30 Mbps downstream. It is one of the largest telecommunications satellites ever built, and its design includes onboard dynamic multi-beam switching, which will deliver bandwidth-on-demand and direct site-to-site mesh networking.

In a small business application, Spaceway is expected to operate at about 2 Mbps in the upstream. It's a different sort of satellite, using on-board routers to control 780 downlink beams and 112 uplink beams aimed at U.S. market customers. Unlike earlier generations of satellites, Spaceway uses nothing but spot beams, allowing a high degree of frequency reuse. What that means is that a single Spaceway satellite offers capacity equivalent to eight to 10 conventional birds using a single beam with continental coverage.

Commercial operations are expected in early 2008.

Spaceway might not be a game-changing network in the broad consumer mass market, where cable and telephone companies are expected to dominate the access market. But it might well have significant impact in the enterprise market, for customers who need distributed, IP-based, broadband mesh networks, where Spaceway will excel.

Spaceway also sets up head-to-head competition with Wildblue, another provider also offering satellite broadband to customers largely based in rural areas.

Channel partners might also want to take note that HNS, for the first time in its history, has created a channel program and is willing to sell to enterprise customers with fewer than 500 to 1,000 sites, its traditional market, using its existing VSAT network. That doesn't mean HNS is terribly interested, if at all, in two-node networks. But it undoubtedly is willing to entertain service for networks with as few as 20 to 50 nodes, something it never has been willing to do before.