Let’s face it: the quality of Skype calls simply sucks. If you are a remote worker trying to put your best foot forward, you probably shouldn’t be using it. Instead, buy a subscription to a teleconferencing service with local access numbers that you can call inexpensively from your mobile phone. Alternatively, spring for a professional grade VOIP teleconferencing service.

Imagine. You’re on your gap year. You just wrapped an alcohol fueled week of tubing and rope swings at Vang Vieng. Somehow, you’ve ended up at the full moon festival. It’s great and the communal buckets of mystery booze with straws are simply blowing your mind. You’ve run out of money and (unfortunately) it’s your turn to pick up the next round. What to do, what to do? Skype to the rescue! Mom and Dad are just a quick phone call away. Who cares if they can’t hear you. You don’t need to hear their spiel about getting a “real job” anyways. They don’t understand what it’s like to be young, how could they?

But Skype for conference calls? No.

No. No. No. No. And No.

Okay. There’s no problem with dialing in to the occasional (small) conference call.

But in general, the quality of Skype calls is rarely sufficient to sound clear and professional. And it’s quirks can cause a complete failure on calls with many participants.

Let’s say there are 20 people all on individual lines dialed into a conference call. The quality of most of these VOIP conference call services is already dubious. But if you have a few people on Skype it slows everything down. They are difficult to understand. They have to repeat their comments. If they aren’t on mute, the base Skype background can make it almost impossible to hear anything. Multiply 20 people on an hour long call and you’ve wasted a lot of time. Multiply again by the number of conference calls each week and pretty soon we’re talking entire FTEs simply devoted to compensating for the horrendous quality of Skype.

So until Skype improves — and it hasn’t shown much progress in doing so in the past decade — think twice about using it for your main voice communication. We’d go so far as to suggest that it shouldn’t be allowed on conference calls either except in the most dire of circumstances.

Instead, look into teleconferencing services that provide local access numbers that you can call inexpensively from your mobile phone. There are also good VOIP services that are vastly superior in quality and features to Skype now, too. We’ve been using the Blue Jeans service recently with good results. Google Hangouts is passable but at times can suffer the same annoyances as Skype.