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Things worked fine before ICE. In fact, stuff like Bittorrent still works fine. If they were truly concerned with connectivity, they'd use upnp. But since that
by MichaelGG 11y ago
Things worked fine before ICE. In fact, stuff like Bittorrent still works fine. If they were truly concerned with connectivity, they'd use upnp. But since that wasn't a standard from a friendly body, they added this ICE hack to try to make things work.
- comex 11y agoAs someone who's implemented a P2P feature for an application: UPnP works great... if you have a router that supports it. Many in the wild do not. If yours doesn't, you have to manually port forward, which, even disregarding the newbie user issue, isn't possible if you're connected to someone else's network. Otherwise, as I assume you know, you can only initiate connections, not receive them, which means you can't talk to anyone with the same limitation - which might not be fatal to your BitTorrent download, albeit limiting your speed, but kinda sucks in something like a one-on-one video chat or game session. AFAIK, all major video chat applications use some variant of STUN, on which ICE is based, along with some proxying mechanism for users who truly can't connect directly to each other, which corresponds to the rest of ICE.
- makomk 11y agoI don't think upnp is actually an adequate replacement for this even on routers that support it, because many of the older ones don't support NAT hairpinning so even if you open a port on the public IP address using upnp other nodes on the LAN can't connect to it.