Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

Skype disrupted my hotel Internet : Get a nicer Hotel?

Adriana passed me this link by Dan York, CISSP:

http://www.disruptivetelephony.com/2007/09/how-using-skype.html

I’m staying at the Best Western and did so largely because they advertised free high-speed Internet (they were also cheaper than others). First annoyance was discovering that I was too far away from their APs to use wireless, but since I had an ethernet cable I just plugged into the wall jack and expected to get access. The very first time I connected, I did get an IP address and could see an entry in my routing table for the default gateway. However, I couldn’t ping it.

Being rather used to network troubleshooting, I did the usual things… bringing the interface up and down, disconnecting and re-connecting the cable. I even went to the hotel lobby and got a new cable in case the issue was with my portable/retractable cable.

Nothing. No net.

In desperation I did the thing that tech support always tells you to do but I avoid… reboot. Nothing.

So finally this morning I got on the phone to the Best Western tech support and after waiting, oh, 20 minutes or so I got through to a tech and ultimately we figured out the problem:

Skype!

More specifically, all the bizillion connections that Skype was making out into the P2P cloud. The tech reset the switch and asked me to connect again and his immediate response was “Whoa! Something on your computer is generating an incredible number of sessions out to the Internet! You are tripping our filters and it is blocking out your MAC address.”

I must admit, I read it with some shock – but not for the expected reason; you see I believe that what Skype is doing is not merely legitimate but expected, and if Best Western is implementing an IPS – functionality that I will assert has no place (excusing compliance to stupidly-designed legal requirements) in properly designed past-or-present public service architecture – well, frankly, you’re being bamboozled.

Advertising “free breakfast buffet so long as your plate never contains more than four items” would be a negative in most peoples’ estimation. So why should they be allowed to get away with this?

So, my opinion? Maybe Dan can go consult for them about what they ought to be doing, rather than just suffering the consequences of their restrictive architectures. 🙂

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Comments

4 responses to “Skype disrupted my hotel Internet : Get a nicer Hotel?”

  1. patrick giagnocavo

    I don’t think it is fair to blame BW for lousy application code that mimics the same traffic pattern as a worm. While you are no doubt trustworthy with a notebook, many other travelers with Windows systems, are not 🙂 .

    Reply
  2. Dogsbody

    I now work for a company that sells IM security products and I can safely say that Skype is [cleaver/nasty/a pain in the backside/very easy to use] (delete as appropriate).

    You just need to plug Skype into a network and it is very very good at finding a way out to the Interweb without you having to do anything!

    Reply
  3. alecm

    @patrick: my take on it is that the hotel should not be putting a value-judgement on the behaviour of machines which are connected to its public network.

    Reply
  4. Brian

    As someone in the business of connecting people to the internet in hotels I can tell you exactly why his Skype sessions were getting him blocked. Every hotel has a limited amount of bandwidth that is shared out across their network. Obviously you have to monitor traffic flow through your network to keep everyone in the hotel happy with “high speed.” What the original author was saying is true. It is the fact that the Skype program runs in the background unknown to the average user and makes all kinds of session requests. This can at times use up quite a bit of bandwidth that may or may not be actually allotted to the user in the hotel. This causes the rest of the users at the hotel to have slow connection speeds. Hence there are filters in place for people that are slowing down the rest so that it is fair to them. This is less important in a hotel where the internet is free, however at some of the more expensive hotels like the Penn Club Where they are paying as much for internet as the rest of us are paying for a room for the night it becomes VERY unfair to the rest of the users in the hotel to hog all of the bandwidth to yourself. So it is not a case of being “bamboozled.” It is a case of trying to keep things fair for your peers in the hotel.

    Reply

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