On 10/11/20 02:11, Rob Janssen via 44Net wrote:
Sorry about the glitches at the beginning. Jitsi was giving us problems (frozen or long-delayed video, etc) so I made the call to switch to Zoom. We regularly use zoom internally within ARDC for Board and Grant Advisory Committee meetings and it has performed well; it also seemed to work well today.
I am a bit disappointed that, as a group of radio amateurs active in IP networking, supposedly the people who know all about how to setup a communication system all by themselves, we have to resort to a system like zoom.us to hold a conference.
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...
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.
Most (if not nearly all) of the Internet's traffic is fundamentally multicast in nature. Even this mailing list is a many-to-many communication. I'm continually appalled by the willingness of commercial services to simply throw money, computers and fiber at replicating and sending unicast packets on a petabyte scale while ignoring the technology and protocols invented to solve this exact problem in a scalable and cost-effective way.
Clearly there's an opportunity here for any group motivated by the desire to do it right. It's something I could certainly support within ARDC.
Phil