Latency SLAs are what’s missing: “No packets shall be lost, and latency shall not fluctuate”. Classical phone lines worked so well because there is never latency. You might get static, but we’re adapted for listening through static. But you never get timing disruptions. Videoconferencing is a black art of trying to smooth over tiny latencies that the human brain is wired to be extraordinarily sensitive to. People rea…
That technology is circuit switching, i.e. the antithesis of computer networking.
Here’s my question: why is video conferencing designed such that when the video drops out or lags, so does the audio ? I never (or very less often) have problems with simple VOIP. Why not make a video chat client that treats the audio as a first class citizen, and then displays the video if it happens to be coming through clearly? Is re-syncing the streams too hard? This seems like a fix that would make the experienc…
Probably because crappy audio is received better than audio out of synch from the video. Having the "bad international languge dub" effect on conferencing is distracting as hell.
For what it's worth voice over IP is essentially solved; tools like Mumble can have 1000s of people with top tier quality. I'm not sold at all on why you'd even want video, 90% of most business meetings (in my experience) are screen shares that could be communicated by just sending a link anyway. For personal calls use direct connect peer'd connection; in my experience all of the problems of video calling is going through the enabling server.
Latency SLAs are what’s missing: “No packets shall be lost, and latency shall not fluctuate”. Classical phone lines worked so well because there is never latency. You might get static, but we’re adapted for listening through static. But you never get timing disruptions. Videoconferencing is a black art of trying to smooth over tiny latencies that the human brain is wired to be extraordinarily sensitive to. People rea…
That technology is circuit switching, i.e. the antithesis of computer networking.
Dolphin used fiberoptic interconnects to provide either maximum bandwidth or minimum latency, with a cross-connection grid that could easily be tuned with a software switch to provide narrowly-predictable extremely low latency with an SLA.
To say that this is circuit switching may or not be correct, but it’s wrong to say that it’s the antithesis of computer networking.
I remember good old Skype from like 3, 4 years ago that didn't use to suck at this so much, at least on the audio side. When the network connection was really bad, it used something like phone quality, when it was good, the quality was closer to Face Time. You could hear the quality shift dynamically when network conditions were changing (i.e. someone starting a download). I really enjoyed talking on Skype back then,…
Why do you believe the quality is going backwards? Is there something they are optimizing for the compromise in quality?
not sure myself, I'm way out of my depth here, but a friend who knows much more about this sort of stuff, told me it's probably something to do with mobile connections. Apparently slow landline connections and bad cellular connections like 3G are unreliable in different ways. Also most mobile phones, definitely all iPhones, not sure about Android, can't go higher than 16kHz when it comes to audio calls, so anything better is pointless. Maybe it's just M$ and trying to save some pennies on the infra, especially that they're not p2p any more (also b/c mobile connections and restrictive NATS). I know They're supposedly not that bad any more, but considering what they've done to Skype's other aspects, I wouldn't be surprised really.