Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Skype Seems to be hazardous to your network!

Network Worlds Kevin Tolly has brought to my attention a something about Skype that I wondered for a while. I have had too much traffic in my home network that I did not create. But another member in the household uses Skype. I am going to hook up a monitor and check this out to see if it is correct.
He says that "It might come as no surprise that you could be carrying Skype traffic for your user base, but are you are aware that your LAN and WAN links might be carrying VoIP traffic of complete strangers? That is, traffic of VoIP conversations that neither originate nor terminate on your network. In effect, you are donating what can be scarce and expensive WAN bandwidth to your newly minted multi-millionaire friends at Skype. (I'm sure, however, that they greatly appreciate it!)"
He further states that "According to Skype - and validated by our research - a VoIP call will consume between 24 and 128K bit/sec. 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.)"
Well I don't have that much bandwidth to donate to Skype!
You can read the entire article here

Forgot the best part!
"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.

Clearly, Skype needs to become a better corporate citizen."

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