It was a bad week for the folks at Skype, with a system wide outage due (they say) to an algorhythm problem in the login process. I use skype to keep my international long distance charges under control and depend upon it to coordinate vendors for shootouts and product reviews. I know of a couple of companies that have setup Skype interfaces to their Asterisk based VoIP systems to handle all of their long distan It was a bad week for the folks at Skype, with a system wide outage due (they say) to an algorhythm problem in the login process. I use skype to keep my international long distance charges under control and depend upon it to coordinate vendors for shootouts and product reviews. I know of a couple of companies that have setup Skype interfaces to their Asterisk based VoIP systems to handle all of their long distance. The bottom line is that the age of VoIP is here, but VoIP still hasn’t reached that magical “five 9’s” of reliability yet. (i.e. five 9’s is 99.999% uptime) Nor will it ever reach the magic five 9’s since VoIP typically runs over a general purpose network instead of the ultra expensive dedicated network that is POTS. (Plain Old Telephone System)So finally getting to the point, the folks at Skype aparently did their homework and have resorted to an old fashion bribe to buy forgiveness from their userbase. In an email blast:When the unexpected happens, it’s important to remember the people who stuck behind us and whose loyalty humbled us. I want to thank everyone for their support, patience and being part of the Skype community. And for those of you who missed out on using Skype last week – I want to especially thank you as well. As a goodwill gesture to all you faithful Skype Pro, Skype Unlimited, SkypeIn or Skype Voicemail customers, we’re adding an additional seven days to your current subscription, free of charge. And even if you didn’t miss out on using Skype last week – you can still have a week free on Skype, on the house!Now if only the mobile carriers could learn to be so magnanimous when they have outages. /brian chee Technology Industry