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A comment on Skype replaces P2P supernodes with Linux boxes hosted by Microsoft. Parent comment

Re:Skype replaces P2P supernodes with Linux boxes hosted by ... by revelation on Tuesday May 01, 2012 @03:19PM (#3915965)
The bandwidth the whole Skype swarm can scale to in a matter of minutes will most certainly exceed what would be possible if you're running everything from a datacenter. Sure, have a few backup machines ready to takeover roles if super peers drop or something else is impacting the network.

IT managers and IT buyers are obviously not the target market for Skype. They just buy that stuff from CISCO.

Skype has invested considerable development resources into making P2P work over NAT, circumventing firewalls, cloaking and encrypting their traffic to evade packet inspection. Even the client itself is heavily obfuscated. The point of this all is of course to not threaten the P2P model that has allowed them to essentially scale unlimited.

Now, you have Microsoft replacing that with the standard centralized infrastructure that scales terribly. Huh.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Skype replaces P2P supernodes with Linux boxes hosted by ... by tibbon on Tuesday May 01, 2012 @03:48PM (#3916085)
The point with Skype isn't that its doing something a Cisco device won't do, but the fact that its highly ubiquitous. Maybe IT managers aren't the target for Skype, but when a customer or someone else wants to do a Skype VoIP call... you need to use Skype.
[ Parent | on HN ]