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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> Not to start a flame war about net neutrality

Too late!

I've never been convinced that lack of prioritisation is the real obstacle to videoconferencing. It's usability. The only videocall application that's ever achieved decent popularity seems to be FaceTime.

Mind you, one-way videoconferencing is becoming very popular these days in the form of "streamers".

There are also non-technical usability questions - like phones, the social cues are subtly different to same-room conversations, and potentially frustrating when it comes to the delicate dance of getting the other person to let you talk.

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The only? People still use the word "Skype" as a general term for video calling.

> Mind you, one-way videoconferencing is becoming very popular these days in the form of "streamers".

Streamers are normally not real time, there's a large delay, meaning lots of time to buffer!

FaceTime works well, but only between two parties. Skype used to work well, but has inexplicably gotten worse - anecdotally of course.

> I've never been convinced that lack of prioritisation is the real obstacle to videoconferencing.

I'm not saying the lack of prioritisation is why it fails, or that prioritisation will fix everything. But lower latency and higher bandwidth doesn't seem to hurt. Going from 100Mbps to 1Gbps made a huge difference. And 1Gbps isn't that much, you can now get it some residential areas in the UK for a very reasonable £63 (about 80 USD) per month.

Again UK specific, but some ISPs have much, much better routing than others (even with "net neutrality"). Of course, in the UK ISPs have to do various government filtering, which probably adds several milliseconds...

Sounds like an idea for an app: each side of the call gets 60 seconds to speak, then is automatically muted and the other side opened. Or do it the speed chess way and have a button you press when you're done with your thought so you can "bank" time for a later point of conversation.

so...Snapchat?

If snapchat was a continuous stream like a skype meeting, yes

Replace the button with voice recognition and let the people say "over" when they're done talking.

Dropped calls every time you utter the word "over" don't sound like a usability enhancement

Hmm. With decent enough speech recognition machine learning (!) you could have the system act as "chair" and decide who it thinks should be speaking, with appropriate UI cues.

Quite tricky as you have to interpret non-speech vocalisations.

Sounds fun. We can pretend we're in The Expanse, and we have to deal with the communication lag between Earth and Mars or the Belt.

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