Are Skype Calls Getting Better? Is Gizmo Getting Worse?

According to some friends in the business Skype has made massive changes to their codecs since hiring some folks and weaning away GIPS with more of a home brew approach. Over the past week my experience with Skype here in France and in London was far better than what I'm was used to seeing. As a matter of fact the quality has reached the level that made me more fond of GizmoProject, which lately seems to be having issues that it has also had before.

Log-ins from International countries seem to take forever with Gizmo. Also their NAT traversal, at least on the Mac, seems to have gotten weaker, and that was always one of their strong points. My chats with Jason and his team always yield short term fixes like rolling back to previous versions or excuses about the database not scaling, but to their credit usually get fixed in a day. But now the one way audio due to either NAT or STUN related issues is really crimping my love for Gizmo, as it seems some routers/authenticators/log in servers at hotels continues to be the scourge with the way they are in effect blocking Gizmo. As a matter of fact here in Nice all SIP apps seem to not be working at all.

Skype is working around those issues and continues to have the best NAT traversal technology around and that's keeping my calling back to the USA costs way, way down.