© THG
Wildly popular among millions of home users, the new generation of Web-based applications exemplified by Skype are now creating conflict as they get imported into computers at work or at universities.
Often free and easy to use, these applications have drawn battle lines between network managers and their own end users.
“Nobody wants to argue against a free phone call, but with so much computing power we must weigh security issues very heavily,” said François Grey, a spokesman at CERN, the Swiss particle physics laboratory. “Our users want Skype, but we must protect our computing infrastructure for scientific research.”
Concerns among network managers are strong enough that at least two companies have recently released software to block Skype – Skypekiller in France and NetSpective in the United States.
“There is nothing wrong with Skype itself, but within a company environment it can cause problems,” said François Amigorena, president and chief executive of IS Decisions [Skypekiller].
For Verso [NetSpective], the issue is more about helping telecommunications companies protect their revenues.
Uh-Huh.
Is it not really about bandwidth. If you have a ton of voice calls moving accross the wire esp. with packet shaping involed – what happens to all the other traffic on the wire.
I have no problem with any extra cost/blocking of any REAL time applications on any network. It does take lots of extra money and effort to assure things like “voice” quality of service. For pretty much every net application regarding “data”, muliti-millisecond blips in service mean nothing, even if they happen many times a second…. for two way real time communication (voice), it can mean understanding the message or not.
Web based ? god do we all have to buy into this Web 2.0/AJAX crap ?
Skype is just another app like any other. On corparate networks the client is pretty nasty when it comes to trying to sneak past the firewall so that is probably what corparates are complaining about.