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My wife is a big user of SkypeOut, the paid-for part of the Skype internet phone service. Using SkypeOut for making international calls to normal phones saves a small fortune on our phone bill.

(see this example)

We have family and friends in Costa Rica, so using SkypeOut to call there makes great sense for money saving compared to the cost in making a call with the normal phone service. You don't have to worry about peak rates or anything like that - same low price per minute whatever the time of day.

But all is not well in Skype land as my wife has been telling me.

For some time, she's been experiencing 100% failure in making calls to numbers in Costa Rica. Failure primarily in just being unable to connect at all and so not make a successful call. Yet a call does goes through if you make it from a normal phone.

To save myself the headaches and grief in trying to convince her that the likely cause of the problem is the phone network in Costa Rica once the call emerges out of the internet, and not the Skype part of the call, I suggested she visit the SkypeOut forum and see what others are saying. (This forum, by the way, is user supported like all Skype forums, not run by the company.)

And wow! are they saying things! I was really surprised indeed to see the sheer volume of complaints in there by people who are having real issues with making phone calls via SkypeOut, to many countries. Even if you take away the more emotional and rude postings in that forum, there are a lot of people who are very unhappy with the quality of service.

These people are paying customers. They have coughed up money to buy credit to use a service which, for one reason or another, doesn't seem to be delivering (and actually isn't, in my wife's case). And they don't seem to be getting answers from Skype.

Whether the problems relate to the normal phone network or not, people really couldn't care less. All they know is the service doesn't seem to work. And that translates into a dissatisfaction of the service overall. And they'll tell their friends: "Yeah, Skype's cool but calling [friend X] in [country Y] just doesn't work."

While I'm no telecommunications expert, I think a lot of SkypeOut issues are indeed to do with the normal phone network and not Skype itself or the internet. I also decided that telling my wife that I rarely have such problems when I use SkypeOut probably wouldn't be too helpful ;)

Skype has been highly successful so far. Every time I log in, there are over 1.8 million users connected at any one time. Downloads of the free software now exceed 66 million copies. And they've just signed a partnership deal with HGC to promote internet phone services in Hong Kong.

I've yet to hear any sustaining criticisms of the service overall. Indeed, the free Skype-to-Skype service is just great.

Yet if customers' poor impressions of a significant part of the service continue unaddressed, that could spell trouble for Skype going forward, especially with the added-value services they hope to sell to customers. New voice messaging, for instance (which I'm trialing - it really is very good indeed).

What could happen is some other company that offers a reliable paid-for service comes along and attracts customers. There are quite a few other companies out there already. Then I could see one scenario - you stick with Skype for the free service and use the other company for a reliable pay-for service. And 'reliable' is the key word.

Then it wouldn't matter much whether Skype is getting very interesting or not.

Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology. Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson's blog: NevilleHobson.com.