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| Sunday, 19 August 2007 | |
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Outage of a leading ‘free’ telephony service reveals the true price to be paid when things go badly wrong. You want something for nothing? Well, sometimes you get nothing. It’s reported that up to 220mn Skype users lost service late last week due to what the company described as a “unique” software problem. ‘Unique’, that is, to two hundred and twenty million customers. Count them. It’s all too easy to snipe at Skype. It’s telephony for cheapskates: those with no regard for things like call quality and reliability that boring old telcos have spent decades perfecting. These witless individuals try to employ ‘skyping’ as a verb in the same way we use ‘googling’. You can snipe at Skype’s hype, promising free or ‘near-free’ calls anytime to anywhere. Initially this caught the attention of home or, dare I say it, ‘hobby’ users: it had much the same appeal as ‘ham’ radio’ had some 30 years ago – free communication. Anything ‘free’ hardly bolsters the balance sheet of market value of second generation dot.coms like Skype and its VoIP peers. Unable to compete on quality and reliability with bespoke all-IP providers, the VoIPers could hardly hope to attract the MNCs; the SMEs, by contrast, were ripe for the picking. And then the outage. Frankly, I don’t give a hoot whether Bernard in Des Moines is unable to call Auntie Mary in New Zealand on her 80th birthday. I’m more worried about small businesses that have junked their POTS lines in favour of VoIP. Apart from losing inbound calls, on which many rely for customer communication (and business), those who have fully embraced VoIP as a poor man’s alternative to POTS are stranded without access to emergency services. Let’s hope you’re not a small hotelier that has gone down the Internet-VoIP route and suddenly experience a fire. Meantime Skype, as a genuinely innovative technology company that was subsumed by online amateur auction giants eBay at a cost of up to US$4bn in September 2005, has been through some media training. Consider the following statements through the outage. It reads like the final pages from the journal of Scott of the Antarctic. The italics are mine: 16 August, 2007 “The Skype system has not crashed or been victim of a cyber attack. We love our customers too much to let that happen. This problem occurred because of a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software. This controls the interaction between the user’s own Skype client and the rest of the Skype network.” 17 August, 2007 “If you are one of the minority who may still be experiencing problems, please be patient. You do not need to adjust or restart your computer. Skype will start working for you very soon.” 18 August, 2007 “On Monday, we’ll provide a more detailed explanation of what happened. Until then, we’d like to apologize and thank you. Precisely in that order. We know how difficult and frustrating the past two days have been. And still, your good wishes kept flowing in. Thank you for the amazing patience, trust and support!”. Well, Skype, I’m going out now and I may be some time. Jim Chalmers |
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