[e2e] Skype and congestion collapse.

[Naidu, Venkata]

-> > Why would Skype be worse than RealVideo, which 
-> continuously sends at 
-> > hundreds of kb/sec, or internet radio, which does no silence 
-> 
-> You're doing the Real folks wrong: in our tests, RealVideo 
-> _DID_ react to
-> congestion. The way it did so was a little strange, but what 
-> the heck,
-> eventually it reduced its rate. Having tested a number of other
-> applications, I'd say that this is more than you could hope for  :-)

  So, you agree that an Internet application can use as much bandwidth
  as it desires. Skype is not doing anything wrong by using 10's of Kbps.

  The worry is that it is using bandwidth 'constantly' with out reacting
  to congestion. Then the fix should not be imposed on applications.
  If we go in that direction, we end up abandoning hundreds of UDP 
  applications. Simple way is to migrate them to congestion aware
  transport protocols. But, may be it is too late now.

  May be David Reed can enlighten us here - when pioneers were designing
  UDP protocol, they might have expected that all UDP applications would
  obey some Internet commandments. Unfortunately, that expectation turned
  into a loophole now.

Venkata.