ISP's to start blocking SKYPE ?

[joidevie]

Does anyone know any more about what's happening with certain ISP's looking to use "filters" to block out SKYPE ? A friend recently mentioned NEUF & CEGETEL were looking to do this - which is a pain because I just signed up with NEUF.. Looks like I may have to start paying the €5 + per month to opt out of their calls.

Strikes me as commercial censorhip.. What next ? (!)

[Deimos]

One of the issues with Skype is that it is peer-to-peer. As an architecture this is better suited to smaller networks as, when the number of connections becomes higher, the network traffic generated increases dramatically. The reasons Skype went peer-to-peer is thought to be twofold:

a. those running it had previously developed the questionably “illegal” file sharing software systems that are also peer-to-peer (so it was a technology they knew how to develop).

b. as they have little or no money it allows them to have no infrastructure (central computers as used by AIM/AOL/MSN/Yahoo/GoogleTalk/etc.)

The ISPs considering filtering Skype out may have different motives, but one quite reasonable justification is that it generates excessive network traffic.

With the peer-to-peer architecture, as there is no central server(s) to communicate with, a lot of communication must be done as broadcast traffic which placed very high loading on the ISPs. In my opinion, the Skype architecture was never suited to larger numbers of users and those who started it have been trying to sell it off for ages (“take the money and run”). Problems are already emerging with the status indication (i.e. who is online/offline/not available/etc.) and nobody has yet started to filter them out.

Ian

[joidevie]

Makes some sense.. I hadn't really considered those reasons at all. Maybe I was just being cynical and thought NEUF were being paranoid about losing revenue... ? Surely not..

[Deimos]

They probably are. Unfortunately Skype’s architecture gives that a justification which, although maybe not the reason does make arguing against it somewhat harder.

Now eBay have taken over Skype, it might make it a bit harder for these ISPs to block (as they now have a larger company behind them). However, nobody knows what eBay want them for and what they intend to do with them. Certainly eBay do not want to get into telephone service provision.

One thing that has been said is that in some countries, culture makes internet based auctions ineffective and that eBay want the voice technology to expend their auctions into those countries. If this is the case them we may see Skype’s current form change as it becomes part of the eBay auction system rather than a general voice communication system.

Skype may have had a lot of users but as a company there were pretty broke. EBay clearly have some motive in acquiring Skype other than broadening heir business as they paid way over the top for them (eBay’s share price dropped when it was announced how much they had paid for Skype !!!).

Ian

[Dan Golding]

I have to say, I don't agree with Deimos on a few issues.

Skype have been around for quite a while and with the venture capital backing that they've had I can't see how they could not have the money to develop servers and so on.

From a nerdy, techy point of view, peer to peer neworking is actually the most efficient way of distributing data and the whole underlying infrastructure of the internet is based upon avoiding bottlenecks.

From the speculation in the professional IT press, it appears that the "motivation" for ebay to buy skype (for £2.4bn or so) is because ebay also own PayPal who are the card payment processors for Skype and as such "cream off" handling charges for credit card payments. With over 150million people worldwide using skype, a little here and there off of a lot of people makes a lot of money.

On a personal note, I've been using Skype for a little while now (only had broadband recently) and can honestly say that I've never had a problem phoning anyone. My ISP is wanadoo but my friend is actually on neuf and when I call him there isn't a problem at all.

Anyway, for what it's worth, that's my opinion