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Skype is bad MMM-Kay

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Well ... not 'bad' ... just a little sneeky :-)

Recently I had a conversation with Allister Frost (the artist formally known as Exchange PM) about the technology behind the Skype platform that most people don’t tend to know about,  it resulted in posting on his blog here ... well worth a read.

The reason I have decided to make a quick posting about this myself is because at least once a month I will get one of my friends or colleagues ask me why they can’t talk to their brother in Australia with Messenger but it always seems to work with Skype.  Without getting to technical,  the reason why Skype works is because if it can’t connect directly the person at the other end,  it will use other 'nodes' i.e. Skype users to relay the message,  resulting in bandwidth usage for potentially anyone logged into Skype,  no matter if they are on a call themselves or not. This might not be a big issue for consumers in most cases but I think this is something that small business and enterprises should worry about. 

For small business this means that their limited bandwidth and capped usage broadband connections are potentially being eaten away by other users using their Skype client to make the call .... something I am sure they would not be happy about if they knew what was happening. 

For enterprise organisations there is a similar concern but on a larger scale.  Because of the huge pipes some of these organisations have and the increased number of people potentially using Skype,  the amount of bandwidth usage they will experience is a lot higher,  just take a look at the report here where a single Skype client was connected to a 1GB connection on Janet (the education/university network in the UK). 

So,  before you go and install Skype ... have a quick think about what exactly you are committing your computer and internet connection to and give Windows Live Messenger a try first :-)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    I received a lot of communication since my last blog posting in which I explained how the Skype client...