I use Skype all the time. Occasionally it would work badly, which would cause to try something else (Hangouts, the apple facechat thing, facebook, some generic flavour of WebRTC). That something else would work much worse than skype under those network conditions.

I haven't experienced anything better, even if Skype obviously could be even better. With 300 mbit connections you would think we'd have somethin better.

Sococo had a product that worked much better than Skype! It was favored by enterprise organizations, so not a lot of coverage here.

I agree that Skype works pretty well, but it would be interesting to try and reproduce the network conditions you're describing.

I'm working with a "generic flavour of WebRTC" and they're still behind Skype and Hangouts, but they're getting better by leaps and bounds.

How do you mean? I've used Skype video calling at least a few times a week for the past ~5 years, and it's generally worked very well? Definitely well enough that it's never occurred to me to shop around.

(Skype IM is a joke, I agree)

The UI is an abomination, I have great difficulty doing anything. But as far video conferencing, in my experience the video and audio is grainy and brutal, you can call the very same person using Facetime and it is crystal clear. And when there is a temporary drop in bandwidth (I assume that is the cause), rather than dropping the high-bandwidth video resolution slightly, it seems to cut the low-bandwidth audio completely.

I'm not GP, but the few handful of times I've Skyped to other countries the experience has varied from kind-of-ok to horrible.

Maybe it's a location thing? I'm in Scandinavia..

I do Australia/UK regularly without problem. It seems to be very dependant on the participants network connections, not surprisingly. It doesn't seem to recover from temporary network issues fast enough.

>> "...Skype is so bad..."

Dude you should try Hipchat video conferencing, it makes Skype look like the future.