Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Skype Down, the Closed P2P Issue


You may be wondering why Skype is Down if it is a P2P network. That is not hard to answer, it is a closed P2P Network which the Fallback Servers and Main Nodes are entirely dependent on Skype itself. So if something goes wrong with them, there is no real fallback like you would have in a distributed regular P2P network like BitTorrent, UseNet or Jingle Nodes.
The main issue is that only Users from within Skype can share the Routes, but not users on different Networks and Domains like you can do with Jingle Nodes.
Skype official response was that they were creating "mega-super-nodes"? I don't know what does that mean, but I'm sure it still have same single point of failure of the current system. Until Skype don't come up with a Federated System, where providers, services and users can share Routes, they will always suffer from outages. And of course the most affected are the users and business that depends directly on them. Nearly 20 Million Users are suffering from the outage.

Open Standard Free alternatives that can provide reliability and superior quality:

Clients with Jingle Nodes Support:
* Nimbuzz (Mobile and Desktop)
* SIP Communicator (Jitsi) (Desktop)
* OneTeam (Desktop)

Services with Jingle Nodes Support:
* Nimbuzz (Free)
* Talkr.im (Free)

Don't wait for Skype to come up with "hyper-ultra-mega-super-nodes" to migrate to reliable software.