• julian.bond on Tuesday scan

  How about a little digging and fact checking into that corporate scare story about Skype and bandwidth? "Skype: hazardous to network health? Is Skype a good corproate citizen or a freeloader that's stealing your bandwidth?"

  Here's a sample.
  ------------
  According to Skype — and validated by our research — a VoIP call will consume between 24 and 128kbit/s. When a Skype station is functioning as a relay the bandwidth is doubled. We found instances when calls between adjacent stations were relayed to somewhere a continent away.

  When you are functioning as a relay you have no way of knowing this other than running constant traces on your network interfaces. Read the licence agreement and you’ll realise that you’ve given them permission for all this, although the old licence was less subtle.

  And, lest you think that you can stop all this by exiting Skype, think again. You might not be using Skype but it might be using you. Skype continues to run in the background unless you uninstall it or kill the process.
  ---------

  How many downright lies and mistruths can you find in that sample and in the whole article? Is it perhaps a shill for a competing VoIP network?

  If your PC is directly connected to the net with no intervening firewall then there is a possibility of it becoming a supernode. That eliminates every corporate PC. If it then becomes a supernode, you will relay switching traffic and not voice traffic to an expected maximum of 5kbps (according to Skype staff on the Skype forum). If you quit Skype it does not leave anything running on your PC.

  There is an article to be written that digs into Skype's Supernode architecture and it's security but this definitely isn't it.

• continued in the Skype Journal Comment River: 200 fresh comments

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