Zoom IMHO has nailed the workflow for clicking an autodial link on my phone, joining the call by video on my laptop and having the participant pin appear on the screen quick enough that I can type it right as the automated voice prompt asks for it on the phone<p>When you're hopping from one call to the other, having the ability to quickly drop and join the next one [EDIT: with audio from my phone] is a big win<p>That, the global Alt+A / Alt+V for the audio / video mute toggle respectively, and the "hold spacebar to talk" hotkeys make it the clear winner from an UX perspective IMHO, even if that X isn't really perfect<p>At the end of the day, most calls are virtually lag free so I care more about my ability to efficiently interface with the app than I do about a perceived streaming quality [EDIT: except, of course, for those participants who don't join the audio via their phone, as their voices inevitably suffer from some lag and distortion]
Personally, I've been pretty impressed with Jitsi especially given that it's open source. So far it's been easy and the people on the other end have had no problem connecting, despite not having previously downloaded any client software. I had high hopes a ways back for appear.in but they unfortunately lost that domain and I have no idea what the new one is.
> In case of Webex, all sessions created in the US appear to be relayed via its infrastructure in US-east. This causes the sessions among users in US-west to be subject to artificial detour, inflating their streaming lag.<p>Former webexer here. That depends on many criteria, sessions can go through multiple locations depending on where the customer is located, the features being used, the type of customer, etc. Since Webex also does transcoding (useful when a 4k wall system and a cell phone are on a same meeting), that can influence where the traffic flows.<p>Webex, Zoom and Google also all have their own backbones to reduce the number of hops over the public internet.<p>In this case the researchers appear to be based in New Jersey so they would be more likely to enter the internal network via the eastern POPs.
> Despite its significance, there has not been any systematic study characterizing the user-perceived performance of existing videoconferencing systems other than anecdotal reports.<p>> We find that the existing videoconferencing systems vary in terms of geographic scope, which in turns determines streaming lag experienced by users. We also observe that streaming rate can change under different conditions (e.g., number of users in a session, mobile device status, etc), which affects user-perceived streaming quality. Beyond these findings, our measurement methodology can enable reproducible benchmark analysis for any types of comparative or longitudinal study on available videoconferencing systems.<p>Seems like a very useful study at first glance!
As much as I'd like to save the money, Zoom is evidently still the best option. Hope the others continue to catch up. Neat to see that Meet is almost as good, according to this data - it was hot garbage a few years ago.
I worked at a company that blocked the native clients for every conference system except WebEx. The Zoom and Skype web experience was not good, particularly since all endpoints were loaded with half a dozen Infosec agents and sending all traffic through web proxies on the other coast.<p>Surprise, the somewhat primitive Webex offered the best experience in that scenario and vendors who wanted to meet were inclined to accommodate us.
I was on a webex recently, and after years of using Zoom I was all "oh, wow - is see Webex has a 'make my skin look worse' feature. Gotta compete with Zoom somehow"