You may have heard about the Skype outage last week. I guess as a gesture of good will, and because I pay Skype $US 29.95 per year for unlimited calls in the US and Canada, Skype sent me an email saying they would be “adding an additional seven days to your current subscription, free of charge.”
We don’t have a long distance service using POTS – Plain old telephone service, or more accurately the Public Switched Telephone Network – PSTN. Our only “home” long distance calling (except for our cell phone) uses Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) – Skype. We even bought Cisco’s iPhone. The Linksys (Cisco) CIT400 has the ability to use a landline connection or Skype, without being connected to a computer.
I found out about the Skype outage because I was trying to call Godaddy, my web host. This blog, which is hosted on a shared server (who reads this anyway?), was taking minutes to load a page. But I couldn’t get through to them on Skype. By the time I figured out Skype had gone south, my web site was running normally…