San Jose State University has temporarily lifted a ban on Skype that it had implemented earlier, but plans to reinstate the ban if its concerns over the impact of Skype on the university’s network are not addressed. The ban was lifted because of protests from both students and faculty who have come to rely on Skype for a variety of university-related work, according to a report in the San Jose Mercury News. As a peer-to-peer system, Skype routes calls through available networks, which can consume the bandwidth on those networks. SJSU campus officials said they’ll shut the service off if Skype owner eBay cannot address its issues.

It took me less than 20 seconds of searching on Google to find this nugget:

Organisations may be able to block or restrict the ports used by Skype on a firewall or router. Limiting the total bandwidth that can be consumed by traffic to and from the Skype ports may be effective both in protecting other uses of the network and preventing super-nodes appearing.

Am I missing something or does that not address SJSU’s issue? I’m not a network engineer (nor, as Rubel would say, do I play one on TV), but “protecting other uses of the network” sure sounds like it does. And if it does, how come I could find it but SJSU’s network folks couldn’t?