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Unreason
Asked: 2010-10-20 02:05:21 +0800 CST

Improving Skype quality

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Every now and then I revisit the issue of shaping skype traffic.

AFAIK Skype is notorious for ignoring most settings - incoming ports, proxies, etc so it is not possible to give special treatment to skype traffic - I guess the idea is to keep skype traffic unblockable by ISPs and telcos, but at the same time it makes it hard to prioritize the traffic and get good quality of the line, even on today's very wide connections.

Now, recently I saw a SOHO router that seemed to recognize Skype traffic and I think was able to prioritize it (didn't have much time to play with it)

So, is there any hope to do this? (Solution needs not be simple, I can do routing over linux box and play with traffic shaping on it)

EDIT: Might be duplicate of How to change routing for skype packets?, but I am checking for new developments and it has been a year since that question.

Seems it is possible to do it using l7 filtering

router traffic-shaping skype

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I think the only way to boost skype is to do l7 filtering, as you said. However, the skype L7 pattern is overmatching, because skype is really hard to identify. On the BlackHat Europe, March 2006, there was a very nice presentation about Skype, its security and how it obfuscates its traffic.

    The only thing i can think of that it tries to generally detect interactive connections and boost those. "Skype optimised" sounds better to the marketing guys than "QoS" ;)

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  2. I wonder if it would be possible to not necessarily prioritize packets identified as containing Skype payload, but rather packets from a particular network.

    I don't know quite how to go about it, but I imagine it would be possible to place Skype applications on their own network, or vlan for that matter and set QoS to fasttrack anything on that network.

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