I remember good old Skype from like 3, 4 years ago that didn't use to suck at this so much, at least on the audio side. When the network connection was really bad, it used something like phone quality, when it was good, the quality was closer to Face Time. You could hear the quality shift dynamically when network conditions were changing (i.e. someone starting a download). I really enjoyed talking on Skype back then, I knew I could depend on it and get the best I could, whatever the conditions were. Now it's much worse, the quality is average, it doesn't handle bad connections well and it doesn't fully utilize the good ones. I don't think we have anything as good now as we had back then. There's Team Talk which is amazing for audio, but much more cumbersome to set up.