Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Skype Is Down. What Next?
32 points by OoTheNigerian on Sept 21, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 27 comments
It seems Skype is down globally and cancelling two meeting this morning has exposed the unusual dependence on a single point of failure.

How come there aren't aren't any global multi-platform alternatives? Or are there?

Google hangouts is so atrocious that it cannot count.




http://alternativeto.net/software/skype/


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


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


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.


Users. Skype is the replacement for MSN Messenger, which people just used for chatting with friends.


Plus asynchronous text chat.


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://appear.in is free and does not require any installs or account creation.

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


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


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


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.


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.


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

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


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.


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.


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? ^_^


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


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.


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...


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


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.


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.


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.


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

http://bluejeans.com/


Have you tried Firefox Hello? Its pretty good.


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


FaceTime serves me well.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: