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Comment by Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 | Hacker News Reader

This is very good news, I'm really tired of how bad Skype's quality has gotten. WhatsApp's voice calls, on the other hand, are almost always crystal clear, often better than even phone calls.

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There is one main reason for Skype's terrible call quality these last years, and that is because it's no longer peer to peer as it was at it's beginning. All Skype calls go through Microsoft's servers, as far as I understand. I expect WhatsApp can make use of P2P (I suppose WebRTC) as I also find the phone calls excellent quality and have come to use it a lot. I'll definitely be ditching Skype very soon once video is proven.

Most cellular networks run behind symmetric carrier grade NATs. Even when you have two mobile devices behind the same NAT their traffic will not flow P2P. All traffic has to be routed to the public net (and then back in if you can figure out IP:Port which is usually not possible with symmetric NATs). They will never be hair-pinned on the NAT either... True P2P is only possible when at least one mobile device is on a public network or behind a more permissive NAT device.

I think @telesilla's point is that a Skype call would be going through all the cellular network's infrastructure, and then off to Microsoft, before coming back.

It's an extra link in the chain, meaning another potential bottleneck and added latency.

It's the opposite for me. All WhatsApp calls - including to others in Singapore literally less than a mile from me - have a 3 second lag. This is not the case with Skype.

Yep, WhatsApp is high latency and really latency is more important than quality for voice calling. Video calling I think is actually a bit more lenient because you can pick up more visual cues to more easily adjust for the lag.

Same for me, where WhatsApp randomly tries to "reconnect" for audio only calls, Skype works flawlessly with video. Also, with Skype, I can make really cheap international calls to phones. I only wish they'd not abandoned the Linux client so badly.

It's not the same for me.

EUROPE TO US, EUROPE TO LATIN AMERICA, LATIN AMERICA - EUROPE ASIA TO EUROPE

All without latency.

It's interesting how my opinion is completely opposite. I feel like chat apps tend to get "featuritis" as soon as they become more popular.

WhatsApp is probably one of the most barebones chat apps I've seen so far. It's providing exactly what I need for communicating with people, and nothing more.

I doubt that adding video calls to a chat app requires a featuritis diagnosis.

Try Telegram :) It doesn't have voice or video chat and the clients are open-source. So you can remove these features if it ever becomes popular ;)

> featuritis

Email likely won't be an eventuality in this case.

Is the quality of a phone call a high bar? I've always found WhatsApp, Messenger and Skype to provide what sounds like much less compressed audio, occasionally at the cost of latency until the bitrate drops to compensate.

At least Skype works on desktop.

What about jitsi meet? https://meet.jit.si/

Unfortunately Jitsi was acquired by Atlassian, so I don't think you'll see many advances there.

They were (are) some of the best at working with WebRTC.

Edit: I would put more stock on Appear.in. They also have some of the best people, and they have recently launched a monetization plan (I was worried about that part)

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