Skype Bandwidth Limit

It seems that Skype is bandwidth constrained. At the bottom of the Skype application window, it tells you how many people are logged-in. Right now, it shows about 7.9M users. I've noticed that the system is pretty stable up to about 9M users. As the number increases over 10M, the call quality deteriorates significantly; I've seen huge delays, especially video, of up to 3 minutes. During morning hours (Pacific time), sometimes there are ~12.5M users online and Skype is barely operational. Sigh... but at least it's free.