This is true... But my guess is that problems with choppiness are caused by the payload - software is optimizing the quality by switching codecs. This is great on paper, but nobody bother to check if this works. Well it used to work, but now it doesn't. It is a shame really.

I'm a programmer and I'm embarrassed for the guys who did this work. After upgrading to the newer kernels - I got so many issues that I cannot use Skype at all.

Back to the topic - increasing bitrate strangely helps in a way... As soon as I get CPU more stable Skype quality is much better. But this is all very temperamental - fixes do work for few days till some other patch or update breaks this balance.