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Having worked in VOIP for a good part of my career, there aren't actually that many hurdles left. The biggest one is IPV6. Once that is pervasive, then you ha

Having worked in VOIP for a good part of my career, there aren't actually that many hurdles left. The biggest one is IPV6. Once that is pervasive, then you have an easy way to get end to end connectivity without having use a central server to carry the content. This is really, really massive because no matter how big you are, the central server is just adding latency -- sometimes a huge amount. The next bit is finding a good UX for doing audio setup. Right now automatic gain control is just broken. The vast majority of problems that people have (after having no audio at all) is that the audio is set up badly. If you want to see how good audio can be in a VOIP situation, take a few minutes setting up mumble properly and talk to someone. It's incredible. Those 2 things will solve virtually every audio problem because most of the really pathological cases where echo cancellation breaks are initiated by those 2 things. However, for doing video conferencing where you have lots of people, you probably need a hardware solution. This hardware already exists, but it doesn't talk to any voip software that I know about (granted I've been out of the business for a decade). Anybody really serious about this market needs to build hardware (or better yet, pair with someone willing to build commodity hardware to open standards). Video? It's really no problem. It can lag for seconds and it's totally fine. All of the serious problems are audio.

jherdman 10y ago
> ... there aren't actually that many hurdles left. The biggest one is IPV6. Once that is pervasive, then you have an easy way to get end to end connectivity without having use a central server to carry the content... I'm not really a networking pro. Could you ELI5 why IPv6 is such a magic bullet for VOIP?
- auganov 10y ago
  IPv6 means every device can have a globally routable, unique address. Hence bypassing the need for relay or hole punching servers. On a side note, I don't believe it to be a major problem in this context though.
  - CodeWriter23 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure I'll still have a firewall between my IPv6 devices and the internet.
    - lallysingh 10y ago
      Sure, but you won't need to NAT them.
    - auganov 10y ago
      Right, IPv6 gives you no guarantee that you'll be reachable. What default firewalling should look like is still an ongoing discussion.
  - IshKebab 10y ago
    Yeah but what advantage does it have over hole-punching? You have a direct connection in both cases.
    - VLM 10y ago
      A slight correction that hole punching only works maybe 95% of the time, leading to endless non-technical articles commenting about how none of this works never. 95% is the same as 0% in the popular press. Almost all voip problems are lack of bandwidth and wifi lack of reliability. Enough BW and a wired connection and its as perfect as legacy copper wire telephone service. The bean counters are of the opinion that 95% reliability is spending "enough" and the popular science article writer are of the opinion 95% reliability is the same as 0% so this will not change until the economics and infrastructure of broadband connections dramatically change. The problem has nothing to do with app developers or library authors, and has everything to do with the network engineering team in IT fighting with the bean counters, on several levels.
      - mikekchar 10y ago
        Yes, this is exactly right. With IPV6 you can give explicit instructions to open up a port because you know what port to open up. The frustrating part is that none of this should be a problem. It's just that lots and lots of routers don't follow the specs properly. Here it is 2017 and you still can't reliably punch a hole in a firewall.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
lowkeyokay 10y ago
I think one of the biggest problems with video calls is the lack of eye contact. I've seen solutions [0] that try to solve it with software but it's not good enough and it's not real eye contact. A hardware (science fiction) solution could be to have lots of cameras behind the screen. The transmitted image would be from the camera your eyes are actually looking into. [0] http://mashable.com/2013/08/27/video-call-eye-contact-app/#4J6X_DmIaSqq http://mashable.com/2013/08/27/video-call-eye-contact-app/#4...
- jamie_ca 10y ago
  I feel like the real problem here is that the camera attached to your screen always seems to be centered above (or below), so you get a skewed looking-down-upon-you situation - either you're staring at a forehead, or the other person looks like they're looking downward. A solution here would be mounting a camera on either side of the screen for a (very) wide stereoscopic view, and then averaging it in software.

jherdman 10y ago

> ... there aren't actually that many hurdles left. The biggest one is IPV6. Once that is pervasive, then you have an easy way to get end to end connectivity without having use a central server to carry the content... I'm not really a networking pro. Could you ELI5 why IPv6 is such a magic bullet for VOIP?

auganov 10y ago
IPv6 means every device can have a globally routable, unique address. Hence bypassing the need for relay or hole punching servers. On a side note, I don't believe it to be a major problem in this context though.
- CodeWriter23 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure I'll still have a firewall between my IPv6 devices and the internet.
  - lallysingh 10y ago
    Sure, but you won't need to NAT them.
  - auganov 10y ago
    Right, IPv6 gives you no guarantee that you'll be reachable. What default firewalling should look like is still an ongoing discussion.
- IshKebab 10y ago
  Yeah but what advantage does it have over hole-punching? You have a direct connection in both cases.
  - VLM 10y ago
    A slight correction that hole punching only works maybe 95% of the time, leading to endless non-technical articles commenting about how none of this works never. 95% is the same as 0% in the popular press. Almost all voip problems are lack of bandwidth and wifi lack of reliability. Enough BW and a wired connection and its as perfect as legacy copper wire telephone service. The bean counters are of the opinion that 95% reliability is spending "enough" and the popular science article writer are of the opinion 95% reliability is the same as 0% so this will not change until the economics and infrastructure of broadband connections dramatically change. The problem has nothing to do with app developers or library authors, and has everything to do with the network engineering team in IT fighting with the bean counters, on several levels.
    - mikekchar 10y ago
      Yes, this is exactly right. With IPV6 you can give explicit instructions to open up a port because you know what port to open up. The frustrating part is that none of this should be a problem. It's just that lots and lots of routers don't follow the specs properly. Here it is 2017 and you still can't reliably punch a hole in a firewall.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

lowkeyokay 10y ago

I think one of the biggest problems with video calls is the lack of eye contact. I've seen solutions [0] that try to solve it with software but it's not good enough and it's not real eye contact. A hardware (science fiction) solution could be to have lots of cameras behind the screen. The transmitted image would be from the camera your eyes are actually looking into. [0] http://mashable.com/2013/08/27/video-call-eye-contact-app/#4J6X_DmIaSqq http://mashable.com/2013/08/27/video-call-eye-contact-app/#4...

jamie_ca 10y ago
I feel like the real problem here is that the camera attached to your screen always seems to be centered above (or below), so you get a skewed looking-down-upon-you situation - either you're staring at a forehead, or the other person looks like they're looking downward. A solution here would be mounting a camera on either side of the screen for a (very) wide stereoscopic view, and then averaging it in software.