I read this news in The Register that says, if of late if you have been experiencing silent moments, repeated sounds, buzzes while using Skype, chances are that it’s traffic is being ‘managed’ by a third party system. Sandvine is a company, which is now boasting that it can manage p2p traffic, the very way Skype uses. This means that if your ISP doesn’t like you using Skype (and mind you they might not like it at all as most of them are providing bundled VoIP services these days), then it can slow your traffic down.



Sandvine reportedly told delegates to this week’s NetEvents Summit in Garmisch, Germany, that p2p services like BitTorrent and eDonkey and yes, Skype were now forcing internet service providers to increase capacity citing a survey that 60% of the incoming traffic into network and 70% of upstream is p2p. This is not surprising at all though everyone will have to agree that it is stretching the networks very hard.



Anyway, Sandvine says correctly that users are moving from sharing 3 MB songs to uploading and downloading 600 GB movies meaning ISPs have had to apply a lot of traffic assistance for this increased traffic, which is in fact true.



The argument is good for devising a ‘traffic management’ system (but that ain’t the subscribers paying for the bandwidth?). However, is this the only reason why the ISPs are going for Sandvine like systems?



Well, I would definitely like to see the markets don’t allow itself to be controlled like this. However, given the current state of affairs where able to choose one’s ISP is a godsend privilege, it will be very tough to make an immediate change.



What about Skype then? I am not bothered about Skype as much as I am about the common internet user.



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