Burned by Skype!

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I just completed the transition to my summer home on Mauritius. For those of you who skipped Basic World Geography 101, Mauritius is a small, sub-tropical island off the coast of Madagascar (which, in turn, is off the East coast of Africa – yeah, the big island thingy that looks like a giant..umm..well..nevermind).

Practically speaking, Mauritius is about as far away from the U.S. as you can get. It’s literally on the other side of the world, and in a different (Southern) hemisphere to boot (hint: seasons are reversed so it’s the dead of winter here in…August).

Being this far away from the comfort of my 3Mbps cable connection (our primary residence in is in Southern Florida) I have to reset certain of my expectations. For starters, bandwidth is at a premium. 512K ADSL service runs a good $50/month, with 1Gbps running a ridiculous $200/month (and yet still yielding latencies in the 200-400ms range). Voice communications are another sore spot. Doing business with the U.S. via the local telecom provider, well, they’re the same guys charging $200/month for 1Gbps service so you can see where this is heading.

The obvious solution is to go with a VOIP solution, which is what I’ve been doing for the past year. My provider of choice: Skype. The combination of Skype-In, Skype-Out and Skype-Voicemail has allowed me to maintain a relatively seamless remote presence within the U.S. And until recently, the service has been more than adequate, with good overall voice quality and a plethora of useful features.

Unfortunately, the recent Skype sign-on blackout has left me completely incommunicado. That the service went down for a while isn’t what concerns me. Rather, it’s the lackadaisical way that Skype has approached correcting the problem that has me fuming. It’s now been over 48 hours since I could make or receive any calls, and the best they can do is post an entirely too casual note on their home page asking me to “hang tight.”

I don’t want to “hang tight.” I want to make a phone call, and my only mechanism for doing so is the Skype network. Back when Skype was still just a novelty solution for savvy users who wanted to conduct the occasional ad-hoc voice chat I could tolerate an outage, even a prolonged one, since it was all just someone’s pet project.

However, the moment they started charging my credit card for things like a Skype-In number and Skype-Credit, the nature of the relationship changed. Now I’m the paying customer and they’re the service provider, and I expect to either a) receive the service I’ve paid for or b) get a refund. So far, I don’t see any mention of a refund or credit, nor do I think one is likely to be forthcoming.

In fact, nothing about Skype’s behavior to date seems to indicate an appreciation of how their user dynamic has evolved. They’re acting like they’re still part of some “touchy, feely” pilot project run out of a dorm room. Wake-up, Skype: Your mishandling of this crisis – and make no mistake, for you this *is* a crisis – is about to cost you your moral leadership position in the consumer VOIP market.