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<body elided>- ❓quality of video call audio vs. landlines?
- type: question
My experience using Google Meet, Zoom, and Discord video calls has been mediocre. Obviously they're going to be worse than in person, which features ~5ms latency, high quality, and an absolutely unreal amount of nines.
But there's something more fair to compare them to, POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service).
In the most old-school instantiation of POTS, your voice is turned into an electrical signal and then rocks down the cord at 200,000,000m/s, straight to the other party's phone. That's pretty cool. I've read anecdotal reports that they created a much better audio experience than video calls. When I search my memory that seems right. But I'd like some data.
Dimensions to this Question
- Aspects of call quality
- Latency
- Jitter
- Sound fidelity
- Duplex status (see this thread)
- Misc
- Such as anti "call-yell" tricks like sidetone
- Situations
- Long distance vs. local calls
- Change over time
- At some point POTS providers stopped using direct connections and added digital links internally for long distance calls. How did this affect things? Did local calls over a landline continue to use direct connections?
- Multiple different video call services: Google Meet, Zoom, Discord, etc.
- Also interested in apps that are pure audio like Mumble
- Multiple things involved in video call quality. Eg if latency or reliability is bad, which of these is usually the contributor:
- The internet providers of the participants
- The video call servers
- The users' computers and video call clients
What I've Found so Far
- Can You See Me Now? A Measurement Study of Zoom, Webex, and Meet
- arxiv.org/pdf/2109.13113.pdf
- 2021
- This part is for the video not audio, but still interesting:
In the US, typical streaming lag experienced by users is 20–50 ms for Zoom, 10–70 ms for Webex, and 40–70 ms for Meet. This lag largely reflects the geographic separation of users (e.g., US-east vs. US-west).
- HN question by me
- HN thread on the article A Theory of Zoom Fatigue
- 📝contact me if you have more suggestions!
Possible Practical Applications
Obviously the country isn't going to switch back to landlines, but I can still think of some uses for answering the above questions.
- If poor video call quality is due to varying sources we should do a better job of surfacing which is the problem for particular calls.
- Right now users often don't know on which end of a two-person call problems are coming from, much less whether the issue is with the video call service or their Internet provider.
- If the latter they need to know whether it's a latency or bandwidth issue.
- Right now users often don't know on which end of a two-person call problems are coming from, much less whether the issue is with the video call service or their Internet provider.
- Google has Project Starline (HN discussion). Should more businesses consider latency optimized video call clients?
- ⚛️Liberties in the Large, Constraints in the Small (DRAFT)
- type: atomic note
Or: Small Trees, Large Graphs
What it is
A design pattern used in large systems where less constrained global structure is layered over more constrained local structure.
Examples
The best example is the World Wide Web. It's a gigantic digraph of links, but individual webpages are much more constrained HTML trees.
It doesn't have to be this way. There could be a hierarchical portal that classifies all sites Yahoo-style, and the sites themselves could be made of little collections of freefloating cards. But that feels inside-out.
Another example is Unix filesystems. These are big leaf-valued trees with arrays of bytes for nodes. We've tightened the level of constraint a tick, but the same pattern is here.
Natural Law
There's an analogy to this in nature. Trillions of cells doing all kinds of highly specified things come together to make John Smith, who's a lot less constrained in his actions than a cell is.
But this is a design pattern not a law and so doesn't have to be followed. A flipped example (though this isn't a large system) is a computer game save manager. It's probably a list, which is a lot more constrained than the game instances it holds. But this is the right choice because a list removes energy from that level and directs it downwards. A game isn't supposed to be about the save manager, it's supposed to be about the items in it.
A Trick of Questionable Usefulness
One thing that can be done with this idea is to imagine new systems. Sort the organization strategies you're interested in by how constrained they are, then iterate through them looking for interesting combinations. 3D space containing 2D spaces? This makes me think of a space flight game with plantetary land battles. But it could be used for more that that.
And there are all kinds of other options:
- graph
- digraph
- flat tag system
- hierarchical categories
- straight hierarchy
- 3D space
- 2D space
- array
- map/attributes
- set
- etc.
Maybe there's a pair in there that will be useful for one of your projects someday.
Feedback
This must have been discussed a fair amount already, but Google isn't helping. If you have leads 📝contact me.
P.S.
The title is inspired by 🎞️Constraints Liberate, Liberties Constrain which is an unrelated but wonderful video.