Call to Europe from US on Skype

Sandy, this sometimes happens to me, too. I tell my European party that I will call them right back and mostly the next call is clear. A couple of times I had to do it more than once.

It could be a number of factors that all relate to Quality of Service QoS. Skype has a QoS meter in the lower right corner of the screen, not that it tells you much. BL - Bandwidth usage, CPU usage, Skype usage levels and a number of other factors at the time of the call affect the quality. You can try turning off the video, but Anna has the right idea, try the call again. If you're using free Skype, you get what you pay for. If you're paying for it, I'd call customer service.

This maybe somewhat technical in nature.

Any kind of high speed connection should not result in a QoS issue unless you are sharing bandwidth with neighbors and they have faster computers that might take priority over your connection. This kind of issue might be solved by setting up a VPN (virutal private network) to carve out the necessary bandwidth to prevent other users from squeezing you out but will not solve timing issues.

Timing issues may be related to anything from a firewall setting (either Windows or your security suite), broadband USB device, routing signal loses, to something in a connection that your conversation is being routed through.

You may want to try to check the response time by pinging from your broadband USB device to your friends internet connection device to see if there is an unsual delay between some points. I know my Mother has some connection problems due to a fairly slow connection beteeen connections owned by different service providers in the midwest which I suspect is in the Chicago area.

Also, you want to check the connection between your computer and your service provide. Your service provider should be able to provide a website that will let you do a reverse ping to yourself to check response times, drop messages, etc.

Edwin