Comment by dana321
5 years ago
Thats a pretty negative picture you paint there.
To me, those are fun things to solve.
The answer is to still have clients and servers, just that the servers deal with the grunt work of routing traffic and the clients just stream the data through a server.
Push vs pull, depending if you can get upnp to open a port to the client.
Skype was originally a peer to peer application, seemed pretty popular and while it still was p2p? It was written by the people who wrote Kazaa, remember that?
*> Skype was originally a peer to peer application&
Sure, but Skype adopted a peer-to-peer design back in 2005 or so when expectations were a lot lower - no smartphones, no group calls, no 1080p, no cross-platform, and if it's unreliable or needs some fiddling around to get it to work properly, such is life - because the competition was paying $$$ for an international phone call that wouldn't have any video.
These days if you want to compete with Skype and Google Hangouts and Discord, I expect my regular four-way video call between people using Windows, OS X, Ubuntu and ChromeOS to establish first-time with clear audio and video to all users.
If anything, P2P high bandwidth connections are often more reliable as your traffic likely stays on your ISPs network rather than needlessly hairpinning through a central server outside their network.
Hence why VoIP like WebRTC encourages direct media rather than wasting a trip to a server, the server's peering can often be much worse than a path between two users on residential ISPs.
For 2 users, fine. But the parent was mentioning 8 users. You can't have live conversation delays/asynchronicity that p2p'ing through multiple users would bring.
and one of the primary reasons Skype is no longer p2p is to violate user privacy not because of technical reasons
I think Ars Technica's take on this makes the most sense. Basically the new architecture might make violating privacy easier but they could do that with the old one too and there are legitimate improvements from the new architecture that are more than enough explanation for the switch.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/skype...
The main reason was to make is compliant with the desire of US Law Enforcement. but yea continues to believe what you want. I really dont care
All of the performance improvements could have been done while maintaining the core of P2P, the ONLY reason to centralize it is to make it easy to tap, and harvest data from