What is Skype?

Skype – Sky peer-to-peer is a free software application that allows any user with a computer or cell phone with the front load camera to visual conference/chat over the internet. Where communicating long distance on the cell phone would be monitored by the minutes spent, thus, creating an expensive bill, Skype makes it easy to communicate with those far and near. Individuals more or less use Skype in place of long distance calling. Nadeem Unuth (2011), shares that “[w]hile in the past you needed to take particular care of the minutes and seconds you spend speaking on international calls, you no longer need to bother about that now. If you use Skype to make PC to PC communication, you pay nothing more that the monthly Internet service, which you would pay anyway have paid without Skype” (p.1.). When connecting to communicate with other Skype users, the connection is free, no matter where in the world the other connection is made as long as the other person is also using Skype . “Skype allows you to know if a buddy is offline, when she or he is willing to communicate, you can log back in at that time” (N. Unuth, 2011, p.1).

Skype also runs on servers and uses background processing on computers running Skype. Wikipedia states that “[s]ome network administrators have banned Skype on corporate, government, home, and education networks, citing reasons such as inappropriate usage of resources, excessive bandwidth usage, and security concerns.

References:

Skype From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved March 15, 2011 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype

Unruth, N. (2011). What is Skype? An introduction to the most popular VoIP software and service. Retrieved March 21, 2011 from

http://voip.about.com/od/voipsoftware/a/whatisskype.htm