I’ve signed up to Skype Pro and SkypeIn. While using the SkypeOut service, it’s flawless. While communicating with other Skype users, it’s flawless. What is wrong with this service?
In short. It doesn’t work. We have two SkypeIn numbers, both in the +44289581**** region which is the “local” Northern Ireland number. I’ve managed, over the last week, to get a successful connection to each of them once from landline and mobile, at around 7 pm in the evening.
It doesnt try to connect. It just reports “Number error”. It doesn’t attempt to connect to my Skype voicemail. The call just fails. And it’s still failing today, a week since I first reported the fault.
Skype don’t get back to you for 4 days when you report a fault so I’ve had my first response where the nice tech support person told me it was working fine and started to ask me to reconfigure my Skype settings to, surprise surprise exactly the settings I had. Another suggestion was to get a new number. When I pointed out that we had two numbers already, I was then to be passed onto the PSTN team.
Now…I have little doubt that the local PSTN exchanges will be held to blame. It will just depend who is more slippery, BT or Skype, in the big blame shift.
Compare and contrast this to my experience of SIPGate. The voice quality wasn’t quite as good due to their generic software client and there’s no option for video or anywhere near the same IM community. But it works And the equivalent of SkypeIn is free. And works. And is in the +44289099**** area which just looks like another Belfast number.
I’m frustrated and out money now for SkypeIn and I don’t have a solution that works. 4 days for response is pretty terrible (especially as it’s a minimum …all of my SLAs are based on maximum turnaround times).
I feel doubly annoyed as Skype hoovered a comment on one of my other blogs about how I would use Skype when playing games. Great – I didn’t link to them they just gobbled my comment as some positive PR? Well, gobble this.
All in all. Shoddy.
I’m sorry to hear you’re having trouble with your SkypeIn numbers. If they’re still not working, do let me know and I’ll ask around the technical support people to see what can be done.
Also, if you let me know which email address you used to post the comment on the Skype blog, I’ll have a look and see where it’s got to.
hi Peter, I didn’t comment on the Skype blog. It picked up that I had used Skype successfully and your blog-bot added it as a positive PR. At this point I’m not particularly feeling positive and have resorted to using SIPGate for incoming VOIP calls.
And I checked this morning. The SkypeIn numbers are still not working.
A week later and SkypeIn is STILL not working. So much for 4 days response. Skype haven’t been back in touch in a week….BRILLIANT