Re: [wg-pic] Tolly's Skype critique

["Carl S. Ford" <>]

Henning, can probably give some thoughts here.

Kind Regards,

carl

On Fri, 30 Sep 2005 07:27:58 -0500, Doug Pearson <>  
wrote:

> Anyone have a good reference to the inside technical details of how  
> Skype works?
>
> The Tolly article says "dearth of information available to us, we  
> learned most of what we know by studying Skype 'in the wild'"... but it  
> doesn't share much about those details.
>
> Doug Pearson
>
>
> At 04:01 PM 9/29/2005 -0400, Ben Teitelbaum wrote:
> > Candace Holman 
> > <>
> >  writes:
> >
> > > In this article, Tolly studied Skype peer-to-peer traffic to evaluate
> > > the impact on network bandwidth.  He quoted the Skype Web site on what
> > > peer-to-peer means: "A true [peer-to-peer] system, in our opinion, is
> > > one where all nodes in a network join together dynamically to
> > > participate in traffic routing-, processing- and bandwidth-intensive
> > > tasks that would otherwise be handled by central servers." Interesting
> > > view.  Tolly suggests that this means your Skype-enabled workstation
> > > may be functioning as a traffic relay for otherwise-centralized call
> > > processing, conferencing, voice mail, etc.
> >
> > That seems like a fair definition of "true peer-to-peer" to me.  One
> > of the big reasons that universities may see a lot of Skype traffic is
> > the use of public IP addresses.  Skype needs a share of its users to
> > be non-NATted to serve as media relays for hosts behind
> > tricky-to-traverse NATs.
> >
> > -- ben
> >
> > --
> > Ben Teitelbaum   http://people.internet2.edu/~ben/



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