HN Explorer

Skype Is Down. What Next?

32 points by OoTheNigerian ↗ HN
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.

27 comments

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Camillo
Hangouts actually works pretty well for business uses. Give it a try.
kartoffelmos
https://appear.in is free and does not require any installs or account creation.

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

jtheory
What's your source of revenue? That needs to be clear before we can comfortably use a service for business purposes.
flippant
WebRTC is peer to peer. I'm going to guess that it's not particularly expensive to run the service.
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.

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.

bazzargh
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.

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

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

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

brador
Why have free alternatives to Skype not taken off? What's missing? It's just a 2 way video stream, right?
Joona
Users. Skype is the replacement for MSN Messenger, which people just used for chatting with friends.
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.

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.

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.

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? ^_^
kele
You still need to use some software to do that. Also, the screen is too tiny for VCs.
anaxag0ras
Have you tried Firefox Hello? Its pretty good.
onerandomgoat
Webex, goto meeting. Use professional grade tools if you are a professional.
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.