Pings too high for skype call to Australia?

Calibos

My mother is visiting an Aunt and cousins in Perth Australia for a few weeks and we found out they have skype over there. I had heard however that a skype to skype call they made from Perth back to another aunt in work in Ireland the other day didn't go well with lots of lag. As a result, the mother rang us landline to landline which probably cost a fortune. We will probably end up using some Irish Internation phone cards from the likes of Global caller etc but obviously would prefer completely free calls or even video calls over skype.

Anyway I started to reseach and it seems anything over 300ms ping makes conversation more difficult with people talking over each other.

I haven't installed skype yet but I thought we should have no problem on our Eircom 7.6 broadband. Pinging boards at 30ms. Anyway I pinged a cousins .com.au domain website and am getting around 400ms. Did a tracert and its routed from eircom to london, to newark new Jersey, to Palo Alto to Sydney. ie Westwards...the long way round!!

Is there anyway to force routing in the other direction for hopefully less latency?

guigui

Hi,

If your broadband is good at both ends then, the call quality of VoIP from IRL to Oz will be good enough.

I'm calling at least once a week a colleague in Perth (with Blueface but that's not relevant here) and the call quality is fine.

probe

Skype is sometimes forced to route Skype to Skype traffic via third parties when a firewall at one end or both is blocking the traffic. This additional hop causes additional latency.

Try opening a specific port (eg 16723 or any number between say 16,000 and 64,000) in your firewall and go into the Skype set-up (Advanced > Connection) and put the port you have randomly selected into the use port for incoming connections box (allowing it to use port 80 and 443 as well). If you are using Windows firewall you have to open this port in that firewall. If you have a router/firewall box as well, the same port number should be opened in that.

The other side should do the same - they can use a different port number if they wish.

This will allow the Skype IP traffic to travel directly between your IP number and the other party's IP number directly. If you both have good broadband connections, the call should be studio quality assuming decent headsets/mics etc.

Another cause of latency is satellite. Is either party using a satellite ISP?

Calibos

Remeber, I haven't even installed the program yet. These tests were pings and tracerts through a dos prompt. I had read about the need to properly configure the firewalls for Skype, but I figured I may as well check the default Eircom to Telstra latency so I'd know what I was aiming for when troubleshooting latency within skype.

The Dos pings are averaging 400ms and some of the hops in a tracert are ridiculous. ie 3000ms etc Could the firewalls be affecting a Dos ping and tracert too? Surely if all packets are getting through 100% then its something to do with the routing.

probe

Calibos wrote: »

Remeber, I haven't even installed the program yet. These tests were pings and tracerts through a dos prompt.

1) If you can afford the high price of downloading Skype [€100,000 for a single user license, valid for one year, the last time I checked :-)] why don't you install it and use it and see if it works?

2) I have been mountain climbing in the Pyrenees today, and am in a refuge hut for the night using a wireless connection (via a VPN), with a heavy snow blizzard outside to mess up radio prorogation. My ping times are as follows:

boards.ie > 71 ms
gov.au > 422 ms
australia.com > 985 ms
Japanese gov agency meti.go.jp > 55ms
Brasiltelecom.com.br 71 ms

It doesn't seem to be a matter of distance - Japan and Brazil are a lot faster than AU.

<rant mode = "on">
Australia has a crap broadband service. Like the US, GB and IRL. English speaking countries have poor infrastructure. And they have messed up the world economic order with their subprime financial mess and fraudulent financial rating systems.

The AngloSaxon blind spot is engineering. Be it telecommunications, financial, environmental, planning and architectual, aeornautical, or any other engineering discipline. The only engineering that they excel at is short term rip-offs!
<rant mode ="off">

bhickey

Install Skype and try it.

nilhg

My two sisters in Perth have both Blueface and Skype working perfectly for calls too and from Ireland with pings in the low 400's, one thing I would look out for is the quality of the BB connection your relations have over there, some of them are laughable, (256/64kb, 400MB cap) when I went out last year I had to up the package for one sister (her BlueFace was intermittently very poor) she used to run out of cap in the middle of the month checking email and viewing pictures in flickr.

Username!

Im on an office connection now and pings to Australia.com are c. 320ms.

The pings will be grand for Skype, it's just as long as your connection is stable and it is according to your other local ping times. Also, definately open up ports for Skype.