> Yes but unless your server is very close to one of the participants you put
> extra hops on the way, don't you? I expect I'd rather send packets twice
> directly on the shortest path instead of once to a longer one.
>
> BTW - where does multicast on the public Internet stand today?
>
I Don't think there is such a phone that is separating the streams to
each of the participates, it is so wasteful that i really doubt
somebody built such a thing
(each stream consume from the user: CPU / Memory / Bandwidth , now
multiply that in the number of participates minus yourself...get the
idea?) and open so many NAT/Firewalls.
I was comparing the reuiqrement to send the audio through a server as opposed to directly among the clients. My personal experience is with Skype vs., say, MSN Messenger or Yahoo. Skype could do multi-party conferencing over three continents that sounded like we are in the same room (in terms of (lack of) delay) while MSN and Yahoo had serious troubles even making a two-party conversation useable. I bring Skype as an example of a protocol which does not use a central server.
I don't know that status of multicast today (didn't change AFAIK), but
i don't thing its even relevant to our subject.
It used to be used for things like multi-player SGI games and I see that it's being used for VoD and such. According to Wikipedia about IP multicast it's indeed not accessible to the average end user.
>>and above everything its a networking nightmare, adjusting each
>>NAT/Firewall of each client to accept each of the participates in the
>>conf.
>This should be done automatically with STUN, shouldn't it?
STUN its nice, but it wont solve all the problems specially when
dealing with multiple NAT/Firewalls and RTP sessions that are criss
crossing all the participates. (Also i don't think Asterisk is doing a
Why not? Each participant just opens a hole through the firewall for each of the other participants.
Easy? , its up to you. give it a shot.
you just need IAX softphones, google it. (i wonder if they will sue me
on using this phrase :-) )
Thanks. I though that IAX is only used between Asterisk "PBX"'s.
G711 is the best, but it will suck on WAN links.
So it's not "the best" now. is it? If it's not good for WAN then I suppose it's only good for intra-office or something.
--Amos
