I have been managing the IT function in a small software development company that has grown from 10 users to 70 users in 5 years.
Most users in the company are office based, but some key users work remotely.
At the beginning, Skype become the de facto tool for communicating between office bound and remote workers. As the company has grown, and more remote workers have been added Skype has become part of the ecosystem of the company.
In the last 18 months Skype reliability has deteriorated. I had initially attributed this to issues with a certain ISP, but in the interim we have moved offices contracted with a completely different ISP, increased our synchronous fibre broadband (20mbps), and installed new network hardware.The Skype issues however remain.
The standard complaint form remote users is that when they talk to their friends, mothers, wives, etc Skype is fine, but when they talk to someone in the office, they frequently get drops, pixelation, and muffling.
After having tried to resolve this over 2 years I'm beginning to wonder if Skype is an appropriate tool for this environment. All of the company's infrastructure is cloud based, so there is a constant data flow in and out of the office which will obviously peak from time to time. We're also Apple based, so there is constantly stuff downloading from iTunes often on multiple systems at the same time.
Also, there could be multiple Skype VC calls going on at the same time. We generally see issues in the morning between 09:00 and 11:00 when we have stand up meetings all of which involve remote developers.
Whenever we get these problems we increase the broadband by 5mbps which makes things better for a few months then we get some more staff, and then it starts again.
My theory is that these inevitable peaks which you generally won't get on a residential connection, are impacting on Skype audio and video. With the company IT profile as is making something like Skype work consistently is going to be virtually impossible. Maybe a dedicated internet connection for Skype would be a solution?