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Zoom is now critical infrastructure – that’s a concern

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31–40 of 230 posts

Re: Zoom is now critical infrastructure – that’s a concern

#31
post #10

Is it? I used like 5 different services in the last 7 months and all worked reasonably well.

I use like five different services every day that work about as well as each other. I do happen to think Zoom does the best job out of the set, but it is only a marginal lead. It would be nothing to use something else.

Re: Zoom is now critical infrastructure – that’s a concern

#32

> But in many of the verticals in these sectors—such as banking or mobile phone services—no single company dominates the market. I don't think that's true of video-conferencing either. Zoom is probably the most popular (and technically superior), but there is also: Microsoft Teams, Webex, Google Meet, Slack, and many others, including open source options like Jitsi. And they all pretty much do the job.

Yeah, it used to be (a year or two back) GotoMeeting and Webex were the 'big 2' and now, they hardly get mentioned.

Re: Zoom is now critical infrastructure – that’s a concern

#34

> But in many of the verticals in these sectors—such as banking or mobile phone services—no single company dominates the market. I don't think that's true of video-conferencing either. Zoom is probably the most popular (and technically superior), but there is also: Microsoft Teams, Webex, Google Meet, Slack, and many others, including open source options like Jitsi. And they all pretty much do the job.

And unlike many other services, the network effect is quite low because I can easily install multiple video conferencing software or even run some in the browser. If someone organising a meeting asks to use something unusual, I'm normally not that bothered.

Even WebEx is still around and, ironically, works much better in a browser than Zoom.

Re: Zoom is now critical infrastructure – that’s a concern

#35

State Courts are too reliant on Zoom and using its breakout rooms for very sensitive communications. This IS infrastructure and should be very concerning. Its an area DHS needs to take a close look at.

We interface with courts every day, they pretty much forgot about our direct connections using Polycom VC and went straight to Zoom

Re: Zoom is now critical infrastructure – that’s a concern

#37
post #14
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those that haven't tried Jitsi - my friends and I catch up on it almost daily. It is awesome. The phone app is great too. You can setup a room that people can jump in and out of, which is pretty convenient. If you're looking for that office feel for your small team, then Jitsi might be worth a shot. And, I think you can host your own server if you'd like to!

We've tried Jitsi multiple times (as recently as a month ago) and the experience has been uniformly bad at anything beyond a handful of people. When we scaled to > 20 it was completely unusable (feedback / echos, delays, stuttering, dropouts, you name it).

Was it with a self-hosted version or the meet.jit.si public instance? Around 20 we had the same problem on the public instances but I wonder how much is server side or limitation on the client side. It also definitely worked better in Chrome, it seems that the Firefox situation is much better now though. On Safari echo cancellation was just not working.

Re: Zoom is now critical infrastructure – that’s a concern

#38
Not sure why there isn't more open source alternatives in this realm. Since I only run Linux, I was amazed the first time I used Zoom that it had an actual working linux client. I've always had hopes that webrtc would take over. There's been demo's of video conferencing done over webrtc 5+ years ago and I always hoped it would get more traction. The best I've found lately is "Unamed"[0] but it is the product of one author.

[0]: https://www.irif.fr/~jch/software/chat/

Re: Zoom is now critical infrastructure – that’s a concern

#39
post #32

> But in many of the verticals in these sectors—such as banking or mobile phone services—no single company dominates the market. I don't think that's true of video-conferencing either. Zoom is probably the most popular (and technically superior), but there is also: Microsoft Teams, Webex, Google Meet, Slack, and many others, including open source options like Jitsi. And they all pretty much do the job.

Yeah, it used to be (a year or two back) GotoMeeting and Webex were the 'big 2' and now, they hardly get mentioned.

Zoom has been the major player in Uni for the last 2-3 years I would say.

Re: Zoom is now critical infrastructure – that’s a concern

#40
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And unlike many other services, the network effect is quite low because I can easily install multiple video conferencing software or even run some in the browser. If someone organising a meeting asks to use something unusual, I'm normally not that bothered.

Even WebEx is still around and, ironically, works much better in a browser than Zoom.

New webex sucks for remote support. It forces me to re-request control every time I paste something. Yes I could manually type everything out but that is a pita when dealing with long Linux commands pulled from documentation.
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