Skype - RV-Dreams Community Forum

gypsy97 · RV-Dreams Family Member

Skype

TxYellowRose · RV-Dreams Family Member

Mornin' Gypsy,

We use Skype with our wireless network here at home and have not had problems. We have PC laptops and use it to call Scotland. Wish I had some suggestion to help you....

BTW, perused your blog last evening. Having had intentions at one time to FT solo, I so enjoyed reading of your journeys! I do the towing even when DH is along, but have taken our TT out by myself a couple of times. You GO girl! biggrin

When out by myself doing stuff like emptying tanks, I could see some of the men in the campground looking like, "Wow, look at her doing all that stuff!" and gotten remarks like "YOU towed this thing all by yourself?!?!" HAHAHA! Yep. Little ol' me.

Keep enjoying and hope you have smooth roads and safe travels!

Betty

NorCal Dan · RV-Dreams Family Member

I use Skype all the time on my iMac and Sprint aircard. As long as I have an EVDO (fast) connection it works fine. But when the aircard is in 1xRTT (slow) mode I can't use video as it gets choppy. Try turning off the video next time and see how you make out. Or just have one person using video at a time...

Tom Donaldson · RV-Dreams Community Member

We use Skype on a variety of Macs, including MacBooks. Works fine with a good Internet connection. But gets choppy/jerky if the connection on either end has problems.

Luvglass · RV-Dreams Family Member

We're on the Hughes / Motosat satellite dish and it's problematic to use Skype for anything except texting. Voice has a distinct lag and video keeps dropping out. I think the upload speed is the problem.

DagoRanch · RV-Dreams Family Member

Luvglass wrote:
I think the upload speed is the problem.

Actually it's the latency that's the problem. There is no way around the fact that a signal has to make a round trip of nearly 50,000 miles (That's NOT a typo). In a situation like voice or video communications that have to arrive in a certain amount of time (in milliseconds) to prevent timeouts from happening, the latency of Satellite internet rears it's ugly head.

For web surfing, downloading, email and lot's of other internet activity this isn't much of a problem, but for applications that need to be done in real-time, Satellite internet just won't fit the bill.

In fact, even cellular internet (air-cards) have some problems. You have to have the best of connections to maintain consistent data throughput over the air to maintain enough bandwidth to support Skype.

(I'll take off my IT Manager hat now)

gypsy97 · RV-Dreams Family Member

My granddaughter called me on Skype this afternoon and the picture and voice kept freezing, however, we were able to keep at it long enough to hold a decent conversation. We lost the connection twice, and just let it go at that when the 2nd disconnect happened. We are both using WiFi and I think it was a bit better than when I used my air card, but still have problems.

Gypsy