techdirt.com — It looks like it's not just third world countries with government-backed telephone monopolies to protect that are banning VoIP. Some universities are getting in on the game as well. San Jose State University, just down the road from Skype's parent company eBay, has apparently decided to block all Skype use on campus.
Sep 23, 2006 View in Crawl 4
adityasenSep 23, 2006
haha....porn is waaaay out of the question. forget porn...even celebrity sites are banned under the category of 'swimsuit / lingerie material'....lol
fatdog789Sep 23, 2006
Yes, because downloading porn, music, and games is far more important the the university using that bandwidth for university services and research....You're not entitled to download and upload as you please. You share that connection with everyone else on the campus network, so if you're hogging it up, someone else isn't able to use it. Bandwidth doesn't just grow on trees; it has capacity constraints.If you want to upload and download as you please, move to an apartment and get your own T3.
mikemacmanSep 23, 2006
Why is everyone freaking out like this is some kind of conspiracy to force the students to use the campus phones?Show me any evidence that is happening. Do it. I dare you. Its simply a matter of bandwidth. Skype can use a lot of bandwidth.... at least when you run it on a few thousand computers. Skype users can become "super nodes" that route calls for other users. Many college campuses have huge bandwidth problems. Put a few thousand kids on a super fast network and when they launch Kazaa all hell breaks loose. Knock it off with the conspiracy theories.
celeronSep 23, 2006
SJSU for the win! Computer engineering major there.
averagedesiSep 23, 2006
Why block skype? There are so many other alternatives.
koickSep 23, 2006
Prohibited at UCSB:<a class="user" href="http://www.oit.ucsb.edu/connect/skype.asp">http://www.oit.ucsb.edu/connect/skype.asp</a>
koickSep 23, 2006
More description of what it does here too:<a class="user" href="http://www.oit.ucsb.edu/connect/skype.asp">http://www.oit.ucsb.edu/connect/skype.asp</a>
jbondSep 24, 2006
From the Wikipedia article:- "A design limitation of Skype is that, if given access to an unrestricted network connection, Skype clients can become supernodes."In general, if you are behind a NATed connection, you can't become a Supernode. Since this applies to virtually all Corporate PCs and presumably to most PCs on a Campus network, pointing at Supernode usage as a reason to ban Skype on those networks is effectively lying.
lebaigeSep 24, 2006
Skype's supernode model has always made it touchy for people concerned over network usage. A relatively low number of Skype users can use a disproportionately large chunk of network resources. Thus why Skype gets banned when other VOIP applications don't.