Accessing Your Call Stats in Skype

Skype is a wonderful tool for making calls, doing video calls and so much more. Best of all you can do most of this for free. Now there are heaps of tricks out there that can make your skype experience so much better. Have you ever wanted to see your call stats. Well this hub has the steps to follow to see the various call stats available in skype and how to interpret them.

First off you need to turn on 'Display Technical Call Info'. This can be done by going to the 'Tools' Menu, select 'Options' and then select 'Advanced'. There you will see the last option 'Display Technical Call Info'. This will allow you to see several important statistics about your Skype call. Why is this important? If you are experiencing a poor call, the information provided could help you to determine why your call quality may be bad or why your file transfers are slow.

There are two important settings. The first is the 'Roundtrip', the second is the 'SessionOut' and 'SessionIn' readings. The first thing to watch out for is how many milliseconds the Roundtrip is. If you are over 100ms, then your call will degrade and have delays, like an old fashioned long-distance telephone call. The second thing to watch out for is if the call is being relayed. If your call shows 'Relay_UDP' or Relay_TCP then you do not have a direct peer-to-peer connection. The larger the Roundtrip number the longer the delay, and anything over 125ms will start to be obvious. Relayed calls always have a higher Roundtrip and the combination means your call will probably be poor. If the call is between two home users and you are getting a relayed call, this means your home DSL/cable router is most likely old and not able to handle peer-to-peer connections so an upgrade is in order. If you are not using a DSL/Cable router than you have a configuration issue that needs to be corrected.