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How Does FaceTime Work?

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Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#141

Post by Const-me »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #109
miki123211 wrote: post #100

> For those of you old enough to remember landlines, it reminds me of those [...] When we all switched to cell service audio quality took a huge hit As a blind person with a lot of friends in different corners of the world, audio quality is very important to me. Surprisingly enough, I've seen side projects that took a weekend to develop that had much better quality than what mainstream services offer. Part of it is p…

I actually don't think bandwidth costs are responsible, nor DSP effects. I suspect the lousy audio quality in modern voice conferencing software is to compensate for people with lousy internet connections or underpowered devices: someone using an older phone in the car on 3G cell service with cell tower handoffs, or a crusty laptop using lousy coffee shop WiFi, etc. It's a tough problem to solve. Everyone on a call c…

I’ve opened facebook.com with browser dev.tools open. The 3 largest java script files are using 1 megabyte to download. Facebook is able to do that because even globally, vast majority of people have internet way faster than 64 kbit/sec. 1 megabyte takes more than 2 minutes to download at 64 kbit/sec.

It’s similar story with CPUs. Modern CPUs are insanely fast these days, smart phones included. What once required purposedly-designed ASICs (e.g. Sony Minidisk had one for ATRAC3) is now borderline free in terms of compute power. A cheap Android phone sold 10 years ago gonna have at least 500MHz CPU, and at least 256MB RAM.

96 Kbps AAC audio works on 10-15MHz CPUs, and 64 Kbps HE-AAC works on 50-60 MHz CPUs, both from 2005: https://www.helixcommunity.org/projects/datatype/2005/aacfix...

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#142

Post by npteljes »

andrecarini wrote: post #105
thisisussbs wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but a practical new Android phone with reasonable spec (I don't mean cheap Chinese oems with 1gb ram) can be had for $100 and can run WhatsApp/signal fine. The cheapest iphone is $399 iirc, the high entry costs that disqualifies a lot of people even in the US and certainly abroad where apple tax difference compare to base currency of usd399 exceeds regional sales tax differences (mexico for example)

In Brazil a new iPhone 6 costs about two months of the national average raw income, while a cheap Android alternative would be about 1/3rd to 1/4th of an average monthly salary.

Hungary:

Cheapest iPhone: 120000 HUF

Cheapest Android: 9700 HUF

Cheapest reasonable Android: 21000 HUF

Minimum wage after taxes: 111000 HUF

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#143

Post by BuckRogers »

olyjohn wrote: post #108
mdasen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Landlines are expensive in a lot of places. Looking it up, a landline would cost me $70/mo which is significantly more than my mobile plan. I think different countries have different norms around things like landlines - or even texting. In the US, people ignored texting for a very long time and preferred to call people even if it was just a short note. In terms of audio quality, VoLTE has improved that quite a bit wh…

My landline here near Seattle is around $60/mo. I don't know why... back when I first set up a land line here, it was $25/mo. The quality of the line has deteriorated so bad, there's noise on it, they won't bother to fix it. A few years ago the line had a physical break somewhere between my house and the DSLAM. They switched me to another pair of copper. I have 3 pairs of copper coming into my house, but now one is t…

>My belief is that they are making tons of money allowing unauthenticated calls into their network, that they have no desire to actually block any calls.

I've been waiting for that to happen on cell and landline numbers. Authentication for the party calling. At this point, there's no other option than legislation. Just mandate how common voice services like landline and cellular operate their business.

It needs to happen otherwise the only solution is to give them up and only do our own outbound calling, never to actually receive any calls at all.

Other options like blocking all calls from non-contacts is risky because a call from a delivery driver or babysitter in an emergency will be missed. It's about the only option though for enduser today.

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#144

Post by ksec »

pfranz wrote: post #89
muststopmyths wrote: post #86

I remember back in the day when FaceTime was announced Apple made a big deal about it using standard protocols throughout the stack ( SIP and maybe WebRTC?) and dangled the hope that there could be 3rd party apps that connected with FaceTime. We were so young and naive then.

The presentation said something like they planned for it to be "open" or something. I believe that was the first the dev team had heard of it. People have guess that patents prevented it from actually being an open standard. Coincidentally, some of those patents expired in the last year or two and the last should expire this year. But I kind of guess the window has passed for it becoming open.

>People have guess that patents prevented it from actually being an open standard.

Not guessed. Apple was actually sued and had to change how FaceTime works.

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#145

Post by illegalsmile »

myself248 wrote: post #99
kkielhofner wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting human psychology note: I was involved in some early deployments of HD-ish codecs. HD codecs are considered to be anything that provides greater than the (less than) 4kHz frequency response of the traditional PSTN. At the time "HD audio" was generally 8kHz frequency response (16 kHz sampling rate because of Nyquist-Shannon[0]). This was around 2009 and many users, having not experienced that kind of freque…

That's funny, because I remember missing breath sounds when switching to digital cellular. That plus the added latency still makes it difficult to converse sometimes. It's weird to me how, after a century of obsessive attention to quality and latency all throughout the whole analog era, through the digital isochronous transition, and up into the first-gen analog cellular system, digital cellular was so much cheaper t…

I miss landlines, talking on the phone was actually enjoyable. I rarely have a cellphone conversation (verizon/iphone x) anymore that feels anywhere near as natural or enjoyable as the landline did. I keep thinking it's the phone, a setting or the network and it's not. The latency and talking over one another just doesn't work for me. We used to have multiple people on a POTS call and it worked fine and now it's always "sorry, go ahead" even when there's one other person on the phone.

The BEST cell phone call I've ever had was back in 2004 on a sony ericsson in Bangkok of all places calling my parents on their landline in Chicago. Crystal clear, almost zero latency, it felt like I was in their living room talking to them. I've never had that in the states and I would like to.

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#146

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

miki123211 wrote: post #100

> For those of you old enough to remember landlines, it reminds me of those [...] When we all switched to cell service audio quality took a huge hit As a blind person with a lot of friends in different corners of the world, audio quality is very important to me. Surprisingly enough, I've seen side projects that took a weekend to develop that had much better quality than what mainstream services offer. Part of it is p…

> but I guess effects (like cancelling echos from participants who use speakers instead of headphones, or reducing noise from crappy mics) also play a role.

I wonder if there is a market for a meeting app that has the best quality of them all, by not trying to poorly work around bad environments, but simply booting people out of meetings until they fix their setup.

Yes, it would suck if you or someone you really need something from get booted, but after a few weeks everyone's setup would likely be fixed so this would no longer be a frequent issue, and in exchange, you wouldn't have 20+ people get driven mad by someone giving a hour-long presentation over Bluetooth audio.

I feel like shitty audio quality is responsible for at least 80% of the 'zoom brain' effect.

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#147

Post by andrecarini »

sgt wrote: post #125
andrecarini wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Brazil a new iPhone 6 costs about two months of the national average raw income, while a cheap Android alternative would be about 1/3rd to 1/4th of an average monthly salary.

Does average monthly salary mean much if the majority is really poor? Assuming you are middle class, here. Also: you probably mean iPhone 12. The 6 is quite old. I remember my 6 very well as I fell on my motorcycle and I pulled this banana shaped phone out of my pocket.

> Also: you probably mean iPhone 12. The 6 is quite old

I definitely meant the 6.

Minimum monthly wage (formal jobs, before taxes): R$1100

New iPhone 6: R$1700 ~ R$2400

New iPhone 12: R$7700 ~ R$10000

> Does average monthly salary mean much if the majority is really poor?

For those poor and outside the formal job market, buying a new iPhone (even the older ones) are out of reach or a very significant investment.

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#148

Post by frutiger »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #146
miki123211 wrote: post #100

> For those of you old enough to remember landlines, it reminds me of those [...] When we all switched to cell service audio quality took a huge hit As a blind person with a lot of friends in different corners of the world, audio quality is very important to me. Surprisingly enough, I've seen side projects that took a weekend to develop that had much better quality than what mainstream services offer. Part of it is p…

> but I guess effects (like cancelling echos from participants who use speakers instead of headphones, or reducing noise from crappy mics) also play a role. I wonder if there is a market for a meeting app that has the best quality of them all, by not trying to poorly work around bad environments, but simply booting people out of meetings until they fix their setup. Yes, it would suck if you or someone you really need…

> I wonder if there is a market for a meeting app that has the best quality of them all, by not trying to poorly work around bad environments, but simply booting people out of meetings until they fix their setup.

There are so many situational things involved when making a call that I would estimate the size of this market to be approximately $0/yr.

P.S. I'm sure this comment will come back to bite me 10 years down the line just like that Dropbox comment.

Re: How Does FaceTime Work?

#149

Post by tedd4u »

If you're on Verizon LTE usually if you talk to someone else on Verizon I think it uses VoLTE [1] which sounds as good to me as FaceTime audio -- excellent. Like completely uncompressed CD-quality audio.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_LTE

Edit: mdasen says more about VoLTE below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28249217

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