Quote:
Originally Posted by hairyfreak
...requires no extra cost other than what I pay for my Internet connection anyway.
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I have been a long-term user of Skype, thinking it was wonderful and would have agreed with all the praise mentioned here, but I recently discovered that the above statement about its cost is not necessarily accurate ...
Last month I was surprised to receive an email alert that my monthly bandwidth allowance had reached 50% — on 10th March (normally this happens between 17th - 23rd)! I could not account for this doubled consumption but made a conscious decision to be careful. (Note: My ISP, Zen Internet plan is capped at 20GB/month).
The 75% warning arrived on 23rd and I became more concerned (and careful)! The 90% warning came on the 26th and I knew there was a problem so began investigating my firewall logs and studying my router's Syslog output.
I was horrified to discover the huge volume of packet I/O from Skype — yes it had always been significant but this was now ridiculous and turning Skype off made NO difference whatsoever! I had become what I would describe as being a super-node on their peer-to-peer network!
I tried a variety of filtering tactics to curb this behaviour and soon realised Skype is so dynamic in its usage of different ports that it was impossible to control — googling for info confirmed that it's almost impossible to remove or filter unless you invest heavily in particular hardware or software.
Anyway, buying an extra 2GB of bandwidth on the 27th was only a temporary fix as it had gone by the 29th! I bought another 5 to see me through ...
I am very fortunate that I have been able to remove this juggernaut, only thanks to my Zen plan giving me 8 static IP addresses — I have a non-NAT network and use 3 or 4 of these IPs all the time, with the Skype traffic being on just one of them. So I simply stopped using that IP address and the problem disappeared completely — my used bandwidth this month is currently showing as only 4.161GB !!
I bet that's made some of you go scuttling off to check this out ...
