
Skype Is Down. What Next? - OoTheNigerian
It seems Skype is down globally and cancelling two meeting this morning has exposed the unusual dependence on a single point of failure.<p>How come there aren&#x27;t aren&#x27;t any global multi-platform alternatives? Or are there?<p>Google hangouts is so atrocious that it cannot count.
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streger
[http://alternativeto.net/software/skype/](http://alternativeto.net/software/skype/)

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hackertux
Tox is a Free Software project whose goal is to free users from the grip of
Proprietary instant messengers like Skype.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_%28protocol%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_%28protocol%29)

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brador
Why have free alternatives to Skype not taken off? What's missing? It's just a
2 way video stream, right?

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wmil
NAT / Firewalls cause a lot of issues. Peer to peer data isn't as
straightforward as you'd expect.

The Skype people actually came from Kazaa, so they had a lot of experience
with sending peer data across corporate / educational firewalls.

WebRTC is trying to generalize the technology, but it's new.

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krunox123
Have you tried Telegram? I've been using it for months already and it's good,
to be honest. You can download it here:
[https://telegram.org/apps](https://telegram.org/apps)

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kartoffelmos
[https://appear.in](https://appear.in) is free and does not require any
installs or account creation.

(disclaimer: I'm an engineer at appear.in)

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jtheory
What's your source of revenue? That needs to be clear before we can
comfortably use a service for business purposes.

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flippant
WebRTC is peer to peer. I'm going to guess that it's not particularly
expensive to run the service.

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jtheory
Well...

> The appear.in team currently consists of 14 people, and operates as an
> independent startup within the incubator environment of Telenor Digital.

That's not cheap, and it doesn't sound like it's just a side-project to raise
awareness for the parent company or something like that.

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maze-le
Thats why i like decentralised messaging (XMPP/Jabber). If a Jabber server
goes down, it only affects the users on that particular server, not all users
worldwide.

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aexaey
Technically, XMPP is federated (like SMTP) rather than decentralized (like
Kademlia).

Point about single-server downtime still stands, of course.

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wmil
It's not easy to make a peer to peer system that can get past most corporate
firewalls.

So Skype is more complex than you'd guess.

Your best bet is something using WebRTC.

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mhkool
most firewalls only let you go _out_ via a proxy using port 443. Also port 80
can be used but then you have to wrap your chat protocol in HTTP which is not
fun. Most firewalls do not let anything come in, so the software on the
appliance/computer inside the corporate LAN has to initiate a connection and
go outwards.

This implies that there cannot be a peer-to-peer setup since both peers-to-be
can only go out and never connect to the other. And hence there is a server in
between the two chat partners.

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arcticbull
What if I told you there was a device that you already had that was capable of
two-way voice and video communications in your pocket? ^_^

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kele
You still need to use some software to do that. Also, the screen is too tiny
for VCs.

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Diti
I guess the alternatives you use depend on the country or region you are in.
In France, I see everyone use Telegram instead of Skype.

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vram22
The telegram FAQ says that it cannot be used for voice calls:

[https://telegram.org/faq#q-can-i-make-calls-or-video-
calls-v...](https://telegram.org/faq#q-can-i-make-calls-or-video-calls-via-
telegram)

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Camillo
Hangouts actually works pretty well for business uses. Give it a try.

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cabbeer
Hangouts slows down my 15' i7 retina macbook.. I can play 3d games, edit 1080p
video and browse with over 100 tabs open... but google hangouts will slow me
down to a halt.

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abbabon
This is slack's time to gloat and market themselves.

BTW there is an abundance of VoIP services these days, from Facebook calls to
Whatsapp to Google Hangouts to Viber to Fring.

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bazzargh
[https://status.slack.com/2015-09/cfcbf70171f9c24c](https://status.slack.com/2015-09/cfcbf70171f9c24c)

We rely on slack; we had multiple short outages last week. In slack terms,
only a small number of teams were affected, but for us, that meant the whole
company.

To be fair, the outages were short, and slack kept us in the loop. But the
wider point is that such outages are possible with any SPOF, and if you work
in a remote team, you should have a contingency plan to know which of those
many alternatives you'll coordinate on when your primary service is down.

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yati
We use BlueJeans where I work, but it is not free.

[http://bluejeans.com/](http://bluejeans.com/)

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anaxag0ras
Have you tried Firefox Hello? Its pretty good.

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onerandomgoat
Webex, goto meeting. Use professional grade tools if you are a professional.

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BilalBudhani
FaceTime serves me well.

