A chaotic situation prevails in the San Jose State University (SJSU) over the university administrators’ decision to ban Skype. Both the students and teachers are standing against the move, which could deprive them from peer-to-peer communication.
If ban imposed, then Skype would find its non-existence in almost three university of California. Previously, the University of California-Santa Barbara and California State University-Dominguez Hills had prohibited Skype services from their campus. Skype had also faced blockades in some universities of UK. The question comes: why Skype faces ban, though it is breaching communication barriers effectively.
This report says,
Founded by the creators of Kazaa, a controversial file-sharing service, Skype uses peer-to-peer architecture to route free calls between computers. Previously, universities had banned Kazaa, along with sister services like Morpheus, iMesh, Gnutella, LimeWire and Grokster, because they were used to illegally trade online movies and music.
The greatest disadvantage of Skype is that its end-user license agreement seems to permit legal use of the university’s networks by people outside the university even outside the country.
Jennifer Caukin, a spokesperson of eBay stated that Skype is interested to talk with the SJSU officials regarding their concerns and educate them about how Skype works.
Comments
I stopped using Skype a year ago when the quality of their calls deteriorate. Their international rates aren’t that cheap either so its no use for a student like me trying to save every penny. I’ve been using Onesuite prepaid phone card and its been nothing short of perfect and just last month they put VoIP feature and rates to some countries (UK and India included) are even lower than their prepaid rates.