[LINK] There goes the neighbourhood...

[Adrian Chadd]

On Wed, May 11, 2011, rene wrote:

> Just curious about what is meant by "ubiquitous NAtting home router".
> 
> Am I correct in being under the impression that the NAT problem can be 
> solved, with any home router, if the person uses SIP client software 
> configured to use a stun server (or does that not work with some/many 
> routers)?
> 
> Even if that method/solution does work with all home routers, it's imo no 
> doubt far too 'complicated' for the most users (at least unless they've 
> been lucky enough to have been told/heard about some SIP client that 
> installs pre-configured to use a publicly usable stun server - don't know 
> if there even still is any such client, but several years ago IIRC free 
> SJPhone did - *and* the people they want to communicate with have also).

The whole point with skype was:

* it worked;
* it didn't need any extra configuration - you just signed up and ran it;
* the quality was ok;

And something people miss:

* the quality was ok irregardless(!) of the underlying network.
  So in places where SIP clients sucked because of a lack of any sensible
  form of network QoS, skype punched through;

Another thing people miss:

* Skype worked around network issues itself. The user didn't need to know
  or care.

Users didn't care about the underlying workings of the network, nat bypass,
codec magic and packet scheduling to work around network quality/issues,
tunneling and multi-hop calling, etc. Users only began to notice (hi UWA!)
when nodes with public IPv4 addresses suddenly racked up large bills.

Any time there was a problem with the connection, users would hang up and
dial again. The skype software would choose a new alternate path which
hopefully worked better. The user blamed it on "the internet" and moved on.

Everything else at the time was fiddly.

There's a lesson here..


Adrian