Re: FW: Skype allowance

[Tomo <tomo () LONDON EDU>]

There is also a brief but specific page on the Skype site offering advice for Universities that I don't think has been 
referenced so far

http://www.skype.com/security/universities/

We explicitly permit Skype as a useful communication and business tool for our students; however with a default deny 
firewall we are in recent months  seeing some issues with call quality as most of our Skype-Skype traffic will depend 
upon other Skype clients to relay traffic - we suspect that there are a decreasing number of Skype clients on the 
internet with spare CPU cycles or bandwidth to relay those calls, but our investigations are still ongoing.

A previous posting questioned whether it was appropriate to consider promoting SkypeOut as a more economical method to 
place outbound calls, instead of using the Landline network. Even as a reasonably small campus without significant 
volume of calls even our per minute rates are very favourable compared to Skype to most popular destinations (there are 
specific locations were Skype is cheaper). However the £0.039 connection charge imposed upon Skype calls from earlier 
this year does detract from their potential savings. The staff of the University have therefore been directed to only 
use Skype-Skype calls where appropriate, and not to consider using Skype as a PSTN replacement as the cost savings are 
marginal and call quality is variable.

_________________________________
 
Tomo | Senior Network & Telecommunications Infrastructure Engineer
Direct line: +44 (0)20 7000 7777 | Email: tomo () london edu
 
www.london.edu
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Radford [mailto:Martin.Radford () BRISTOL AC UK] 
Sent: 07 June 2007 21:18
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: Re: [SECURITY] FW: Skype allowance

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- --On 07 June 2007 11:21 -0500 "Kutil, Charlie D." <Kutil () TAMHSC EDU>
wrote:

> Can anyone share their universities stance on the utilization of
> Skype on the university network?  
>
> Are you blocking it, allowing it, or ambivalent towards the
> application? 

I'd be interested to hear whether anyone has looked at the business
version of Skype: <http://www.skype.com/business/>

Skype for Business is supplied as an MSI and can be managed by Group
Policy, according to their site.  Their Guide for Network
Administrators can be found here: 
<http://www.skype.com/security/guide-for-network-admins-30beta.pdf>

I've been asked to deploy Skype to a couple of training rooms over the
summer, but haven't yet had a chance to look at it.

Martin
- -- 
Martin Radford  (Martin.Radford () bristol ac uk)
Personal Computer Systems Team
Information Systems & Computing
University of Bristol Information Services
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