Over the last few months I have noticed a drastic decrease in quality over Skype. Regardless if we use one, two, or ten users on Skype, (and I am usually hosting since I have 2.5mbit upstream) we notice some people have excellent quality, and some have very horrible quality.
As soon as a user is on a provider that shapes micro packets we get glitches like no other. We actually have decided to kick users off the conference calls just to keep it more enjoyable for the rest. Skype’s overall quality is going down too. We notice more compression, podcasts are harder to do as a group, and using it for meetings is either Good enough, or Let’s try again tomorrow. Robot voices, darth vader distortions, delays where words are stretched, or users suddenly stuttering and looping for a second every other minute, etc are just a few of the glitches I notice more and more.