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I doubt anyone would be using Teams if it had not been produced by Microsoft. It has so many shortcomings that I know I will miss some, but here's a gripe list

I doubt anyone would be using Teams if it had not been produced by Microsoft. It has so many shortcomings that I know I will miss some, but here's a gripe list anyway: 1) Echo cancellation. This is a solved problem and pretty much every other conferencing app does it right. Microsoft probably rolled their own which is why it does not work right. 2) I have Teams installed on my desktop, Android phone, and iPad. (Unfortunately, my company wants us to use it.) Regardless of the notification settings in the apps, if I was on the desktop but switched my KVM away, my phone and iPad will not notify me of incoming Teams calls, messages, etc. 3) Editing a document using the collaborative environment is painfully broken. Sometimes it will take many seconds to register a keystroke (on a gigabit-class CONUS connection). Sometimes edits will disappear completely, or sometimes just temporarily. Change tracking doesn't work right. Google Docs had collaborative editing perfected over 10 years ago. 4) Moving files in/out of Teams "Folders" can be painfully slow. 5) Interoperability between the desktop Teams app and govcloud/non-govcloud users is hosed, but it seems to work fine on phones and tablets. Desktop users must access meetings via browser if their "home" Teams account govcloud flavor does not match that of the meeting originator, but no such restrictions exist on phones & tablets. WTF? 6) The Linux desktop version of Teams does not operate with govcloud at all. 7) Depending on the platform, users cannot share their desktop when using the browser-based version. Chrome actually supports this better than Edge.

rightbyte 5y ago
> 1) Echo cancellation. This is a solved problem and pretty much every other conferencing app does it right. Microsoft probably rolled their own which is why it does not work right. I don't know if Teams is worse or not, but my take is that it is impossible to do right for conversations since it introduces too much lag. I sincerely prefer echoes. Old time phones worked just fine and it felt like you stood next to the person you were speaking too instead of speaking through some filter group delay.
- toast0 5y ago
  Old timey phone systems did have echo cancelation. One of the tones in high speed (hah!) modem handshakes is intended to disable the echo cancelers, so that the modems can do it better, but the system echo cancellers usually worked well for actual voice communications. They also had a whole heck of a lot less latency. Sure, routes were probably less direct, but if you had an honest to goodness analog line, the only added latency was from amplifiers and multiplexing equipment, neither of which added significant latency. More likely your call would be digitized and sent as part of a T1 or similar circuit; but that doesn't add a lot of delay, because a T1 is multiplexed as one sample per line, 8000 samples per second per line. Where your is connected at digital telphone switches, there would need to be a buffer to match up timing, but it only needs to be one sample long. There's not likely to be that many switches on a call, so total added latency is going to be a few sample lengths, and maybe around 1ms. (This is in addition to the transmission delay, of course) In contrast, modern computers have meaningful audio sampling delays, and transmitting each sample would kill your network, so you batch a few samples (usually 10-40ms worth), there's delay from the encode/decode, and packet switched networking also adds delay in waiting for a send slot. Echo cancelling with all that latency is even more important, cause the echos are hard to tune out when they come back so late.
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    Interesting thank you for the writeup! I tried to find a comparison of sound latency for old phones, modern mobile and e.g. MS Teams, but couldn't find any. I didn't know there were echo cancellation in old time phones: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_suppression_and_cancellation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_suppression_and_cancell... Is it maybe the background noise filters that mess up sound latency in Teams? I used to play with friends over a privately hosted Ventrilo server back in the days, and the conversations were always crystal clear and felt like instant. Maybe the VOIP providers just timeshare calls too much in their servers or have bad routing of packages.
- c-linkage 5y ago
  I used a wired headset it work and notice no lag. However, Bluetooth earphones are the absolute worst! The lag is really noticeable, almost 500ms!
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    Hmm ... maybe that was my problem too. Someday I will hook up my oscilloscope to a microphone somehow and measure round trip latency for different setups.

rightbyte 5y ago

> 1) Echo cancellation. This is a solved problem and pretty much every other conferencing app does it right. Microsoft probably rolled their own which is why it does not work right. I don't know if Teams is worse or not, but my take is that it is impossible to do right for conversations since it introduces too much lag. I sincerely prefer echoes. Old time phones worked just fine and it felt like you stood next to the person you were speaking too instead of speaking through some filter group delay.

toast0 5y ago
Old timey phone systems did have echo cancelation. One of the tones in high speed (hah!) modem handshakes is intended to disable the echo cancelers, so that the modems can do it better, but the system echo cancellers usually worked well for actual voice communications. They also had a whole heck of a lot less latency. Sure, routes were probably less direct, but if you had an honest to goodness analog line, the only added latency was from amplifiers and multiplexing equipment, neither of which added significant latency. More likely your call would be digitized and sent as part of a T1 or similar circuit; but that doesn't add a lot of delay, because a T1 is multiplexed as one sample per line, 8000 samples per second per line. Where your is connected at digital telphone switches, there would need to be a buffer to match up timing, but it only needs to be one sample long. There's not likely to be that many switches on a call, so total added latency is going to be a few sample lengths, and maybe around 1ms. (This is in addition to the transmission delay, of course) In contrast, modern computers have meaningful audio sampling delays, and transmitting each sample would kill your network, so you batch a few samples (usually 10-40ms worth), there's delay from the encode/decode, and packet switched networking also adds delay in waiting for a send slot. Echo cancelling with all that latency is even more important, cause the echos are hard to tune out when they come back so late.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  Interesting thank you for the writeup! I tried to find a comparison of sound latency for old phones, modern mobile and e.g. MS Teams, but couldn't find any. I didn't know there were echo cancellation in old time phones: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_suppression_and_cancellation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_suppression_and_cancell... Is it maybe the background noise filters that mess up sound latency in Teams? I used to play with friends over a privately hosted Ventrilo server back in the days, and the conversations were always crystal clear and felt like instant. Maybe the VOIP providers just timeshare calls too much in their servers or have bad routing of packages.
c-linkage 5y ago
I used a wired headset it work and notice no lag. However, Bluetooth earphones are the absolute worst! The lag is really noticeable, almost 500ms!
- rightbyte 5y ago
  Hmm ... maybe that was my problem too. Someday I will hook up my oscilloscope to a microphone somehow and measure round trip latency for different setups.