Tag: skype

SJSU Skype meeting tonight, in person and, um, on Skype

Ryan Sholin

[2nd UPDATE: Skype lives at SJSU for now. Details at Skype Journal.]

[UPDATE: Yeah, I totally didn’t tune in due to a scheduling conflict, but the word on the street is that SJSU will allow Skype usage. I’m wondering if we’re now a beta tester for Skype for Enterprise…]

There’s an open forum on the proposed Skype ban at SJSU tonight at 5pm, in Dwight Bentel Hall room 226.

Or, if like me, you can’t make it to campus today, just tune into the Skypecast. I’ll be there with my headset on.

The questions I want answered about the proposed Skype ban at SJSU

Ryan Sholin2 Comments

San Jose State University is throwing around the idea of banning Skype from its network, due to concerns over Skype’s grid computing model. In Internet layman’s terms, that means Skype uses everybody’s bandwidth to ship packets around instead of some big central server of epic proportions.

The folks behind Skype are the same people who built Kazaa, a pretty successful, and in the end, legally-challenged, peer-to-peer file sharing (read: music) network. So just imagine the technology behind P2P file sharing working to put through your phone calls.

Well, the story moved from Steve Sloan’s blog (more) to the Spartan Daily to the Mercury News, with quite a few stops at some notable VoIP blogs, but no one has yet mentioned the fact that SJSU’s 8-month-old wireless network was built out by Comcast, a company that happens to provide quite a bit of VoIP service of its own.

I’d love to know if there’s a connection there.

Second question: Is the proposed ban based on any actual data, or is it just something the UCAT admins think is a smart move?

If there’s data, feel free to share, guys. I’m sure there’s a few hundred computer science and computer engineering majors who use VoIP applications to talk to their families back home that would be really interested in helping you crunch those numbers.

“Powering Silicon Valley,” indeed…