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No, don't blame this on net neutrality. Skype used to be great, even for vidcalls - maybe not conferencing, but was tolerable - when it was pre-M$ and when it was p2p.

The thing that is destroying video calls is making them going through a centralized system; that's a delay and 2x bandwith for everyone.

This is not a net-neutrality thing.




> No, don't blame this on net neutrality.

I never said that. I agree it's more fundamental than that, since TCP/IP (and UDP) make no latency guarantees. (I also happen to live in a country unaffected from the situation in the US, so it is just a gedankenexperiment for me)

> The thing that is destroying video calls is making them going through a centralized system

There are many things that destroy video calls. Inadequate bandwidth. Terrible WiFi hardware (LTE/4G has worked better for me in several cases). Centralized system can even provide a benefit. Users of Teamspeak or Ventrilo might remember how much they outperformed P2P in an age of very limited bandwidth (given the server had adequate bandwidth).


So shouldn't WebRTC be more awesome then?

http://peerjs.com/


There's still unfortunately some sizeable gaps in implementation[0].

[0]:http://caniuse.com/#feat=rtcpeerconnection


Okay but on the browsers where it's implemented well, it is awesome?

It's not like Skype is designed to run on many architectures per OS either. Just pick one and use it!

My question though -- does WebRTC have better quality videoconferencing than Skype and Hangouts right now on the best browser implementation?




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