Re: GNOME Chat and the future of instant messaging in gnome

[Daniel Pocock <daniel pocock pro>]

On 13/11/15 10:59, Damien Sandras wrote:
> Le vendredi 13 novembre 2015 à 09:38 +0100, Daniel Pocock a écrit :
> > > > Note: Do not forget another alternative being updated, as Ekiga. >
> > > http://blog.ekiga.net/?p=201 Yes. +1 Ekiga Ekiga seems like a good
> > > alternative besides upgrading involves not only a new interface, also
> > > several changes inside the hood. I wish that supports HD video call. 
> >
> >
> > Has Ekiga added support for NAT traversal using ICE and TURN though?
> > Any softphone without that tends to have limited usefulness as it will
> > sometimes have problems with one-way audio and ghost calls and that
> > irritates people a lot.
>
> Unfortunately not, due to the lack of manpower on the project.
>
> However :
> - ICE does not cover all cases and will fail too

It is a better way to fail though: when ICE fails, it tells the user
there is no reliable media path.

This is better than the way many first-generation softphones behave,
many of them make no attempt to test the media path, they give the user
an indication that the call is connected but the user can't hear or see
the other party.  This undermines credibility in the softphone and in
free software in general.

> - TURN implies relaying the trafic, which we will do at the Ekiga.net
> level to mitigate the problem. 

There will always be some situations where a relay is required.  I have
packaged several TURN servers for Debian and Fedora systems and
described them in the RTC Quick Start Guide:
http://rtcquickstart.org/guide/multi/optimal-connectivity-turn.html
so anybody operating their own SIP or XMPP server can now have a TURN
server up and running in just a few minutes.

> We will try providing a far-end NAT traversal approach that will work
> 100% of the time.

No solution will work 100% of the time.  Some firewalls use deep packet
inspection to detect media relay through TCP, for example, and they drop
the connection.  The important thing is to use the standards that other
people are implementing (ICE and TURN) so that softphones can call each
other reliably in the 99% of situations where ICE can find a way to
communicate.

Lumicall[1] and telepathy-resiprocate[2] both use ICE and TURN and they
both interoperate with each other.  WebRTC uses ICE and TURN and that
means hundreds of millions of users have that technology in their browser.

Regards,

Daniel


1. http://lumicall.org
2. http://danielpocock.com/enterprise-grade-sip-coming-to-telepathy