Latency isn't the problem. The problem is having anywhere between 2 and 1000 participants in a room, with different quality/bandwidth of connections, and transmitting those streams back out to everyone else in the room.
We use Janus Gateway with our product, and it works fine up to 15 or 20 users, but there is no way that I would ever recommend it (or anything other than Zoom) for a large number of users in the same room.
Having said that, I think they have already solved all those problems now, so I don't really see the need for a huge number of engineers at Zoom, other than what is required to keep the whole shebang running.
> Latency isn't the problem. The problem is having anywhere between 2 and 1000 participants in a room, with different quality/bandwidth of connections, and transmitting those streams back out to everyone else in the room.
And don't forget they're often doing it with end-to-end encryption involved, and they've somehow done it without impacting the user experience much. In a vacuum, I'd expect that to introduce non-trivial latency / performance issues that would lead to "just turn off end-to-end encryption for this call so it'll work," but it really hasn't. They really deserve some praise for this.
Janus gateway and webrtc in general has encryption as well, so I wouldn't say that is a major engineering problem. It just requires a certain amount of hardware to be thrown at it.
I don't just mean encryption--I mean end-to-end encryption.
That means you can't throw hardware at it. You're limited to the hardware end users are using. Every client needs to be able to meet the needs of every other client, when each could be on a flaky cellular connection, or on a Raspberry Pi, or on a high-end PC with dedicated bandwidth. And how much CPU / memory / bandwidth / latency you have will often change during the call.
You can't just have the client send out the best video / audio it can and transcode it to meet other clients' capabilities server-side because of the end-to-end encryption. Getting it to work as seamlessly as Zoom does is an accomplishment.
No recording and no whiteboard, which for most people in my business (tutoring) would be a complete deal breaker.
How well does E2EE actually work in terms of video quality and coping with poor connections? I can't find any info on that. Bear in mind that you have to enable E2EE, so the vast majority of sessions will NOT have it enabled. I'm guessing it will just be in small sessions with good internet connections.
I don't use Zoom very often, but I had a meeting on it a few days ago and it wasn't great. When I logged into the meeting it had to download the new .exe at 10Mbps, even though I have a 500Mbps connection, then it spent another minute installing it. Not terribly impressed with that, either having to use a .exe in 2023, or the painfully slow connection to their servers.
We use Janus Gateway with our product, and it works fine up to 15 or 20 users, but there is no way that I would ever recommend it (or anything other than Zoom) for a large number of users in the same room.
Having said that, I think they have already solved all those problems now, so I don't really see the need for a huge number of engineers at Zoom, other than what is required to keep the whole shebang running.