I'm currently using The Switchboard great right now at home. However, in a couple of weeks i'll be going off to univeristy where the only connection i'll have available is the university shared network.
Unfortunately VoIP apps such as Skype are blocked in the network so that students cannot use them. I heard this is done due to the fact VoIP programs run on any available bandwidth which, doing so, would lead to a congestion problem on the network.
Would it be possible for the university to put restrictions on The switchboard? I assume as it runs on port 80 they would have trouble wihout disabling the whole use of HTTP.
Any help or comments would be appreciated! Thanks in advance.
One of the reasons that Skype uses so much bandwidth is that it can run in a mode where your computer is used as a "supernode", which relays voice traffic for other users on the Skype network. Your computer essentially becomes a VoIP server, consuming as much bandwidth as it can get its hands on. This can use huge amounts of bandwidth, so I imagine that most universities prevent this (to the degree that they can).
The switchboard on the other hand never functions as a supernode. All comunications are either peer to peer, or through our relay servers. Thus the maximum bandwidth you ever use while using the switchboard is about 6 -> 10 KB/s per voice conversation. While the switchboard is idle (i.e. no call active), you are basically using 0 bytes of bandwidth (a few bytes per minute to keep your connection to the switchboard servers alive).
One effective way for the university to block the switchboard would be to simply block access to theswitchboard.ca domain. That would effectively stop anyone from even using the applet at all. If they wanted to limit the amount of data used during voice communication they could limit the peer to peer traffic that flows over UDP, but as I stated before this is hardly necessary, as the switchboard uses very little bandwidth, and only uses it while you are actively engaged in a call.
