12 Oct
2020
12 Oct
'20
3:58 a.m.
If you're offering to organize, create and
open-source a conferencing
system that does what Zoom does AND SCALES UP, be my guest! You could
even apply to us for a grant...
I don't know how wide its coverage is, but here in Europe we have a network
of Asterisk PABXes on AMPRnet that have interconnecting trunks between them
that allow you to call anyone on the network on their roaming number.
Phone numbers are allocated based on the callsign (using a scheme based on
the letters printed on DTMF keypads. based on my callsign, my phone number
is 713210234253 for "1st letter on key 7, 2nd letter on key 3, digit 1, 3rd
letter on key 2, 2nd letter on key 4, 3rd letter on key 5" giving PE1CHL ).
The DUNDi trunk protocol distributes the information about the home server
for each number across the network, so all Asterisk servers know how to
route the calls.
It is easy to host a conference on one or more of the Asterisk servers and
have everyone dial in to that. There is such a conference running on my
local
server where I have my IP phone connected all the time.
I think such systems can do low-bandwidth video as well, but I have never
tried that. For audio it works perfectly.
Seriously, this touches on one of my pet topics: IP
multicasting. A huge
amount of work went into the development of IP multicast protocols in
the 1980s and 1990s, yet nearly all of it has been stillborn. It sees
use only in walled gardens like AT&T Uverse (an IPTV over VDSL service
in the US) and in degenerate form for intra-net resource discovery on LANs.
I agree that would be much more efficient than having the basic star-type
structure where everyone gets the same stream from one server. That
would be one thing that could be implemented in AMPRnet to show the world
that it really has advantages.
For phone quality voice and the number of attendees we would expect, running
this over AMPRnet in the star configuration should be no issue.
Rob