[HN Gopher] Can You See Me Now? A measurement study of Zoom, Web...
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Can You See Me Now? A measurement study of Zoom, Webex, and Meet
Author : pramodbiligiri
Score : 33 points
Date : 2021-09-29 18:55 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| athenot wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
|
| Webex, Zoom and Google also all have their own backbones to
| reduce the number of hops over the public internet.
|
| 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.
| listenallyall wrote:
| 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.
| camgunz wrote:
| My prayers have been answered. Google Meet devs I beg you, make
| the app more efficient.
| travoc wrote:
| 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.
|
| Surprise, the somewhat primitive Webex offered the best
| experience in that scenario and vendors who wanted to meet were
| inclined to accommodate us.
| wenc wrote:
| > Surprise, the somewhat primitive Webex offered the best
| experience in that scenario
|
| But it's not a surprise in this scenario since WebEx is the
| only one not hobbled, no?
|
| I've used all 3 and WebEx is second to Zoom but better than
| Skype.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Webex interface is... not great. Zoom isn't either and I'm
| quite surprised it's as popular as it is given the UX.
| Surprising these things are as difficult as they are and yet
| get such adoption.
| soylentnewsorg wrote:
| The webex interface is perfectly fine, but if you are
| comparing it for the use case of zoom and skype, your target
| interface is wrong for the tool you're using. Webex is for
| working on something together. Multiple users using an
| application to manage some piece of hardware or software for
| example. Zoom and skype are for talking about something
| together.
|
| Let's say you get a new server. It needs several teams to set
| it up - storage to provision/rescan/configure disk, infosec
| to do domain/antivirus/dlp work, db team to get the database
| going. They're going to share an rdp session over webex and
| hand it off to each other to type commands, with everyone
| observing and catching mistakes. Yes, it's possible to give
| desktop control to someone on zoom, however that is a
| secondary afterthought of zoom, while for webex it's the
| primary function. Right tool for the job - don't transport a
| piano in a sports car then complain the sports car is.. not
| great.
| azinman2 wrote:
| We use Webex at work (a very large tech company). I use it
| for it's intended purposes. My issues:
|
| 1. The reaction buttons don't indicate that anything is
| actually happening for you when you click them, you only
| can see others reactions. They're also quite hidden when
| they come, make no noise so easy to miss, and don't tie to
| the video.
|
| 2. The "people joined" ding is very non-intelligent. It
| used to be when 30+ people were queued for something to
| start, once it did it just dinged like crazy. Now it seems
| work has turned that off in a way I cannot turn back on,
| which means when people are late for a 1:1 they're staring
| at me and I have no idea since I now have people blocking.
| A heuristic that would be aware of # participants, when
| people are joining, and batching up dings I cannot imagine
| would be groundbreaking research when this is your product
| you're building.
|
| 3. The actual controls for video on mobile to switch camera
| is quite bad.
|
| 4. Screen sharing works _ok_, except it has no integration
| with the resolutions on both sides, Apple's accessibility-
| based zoom, I'm given a red dot for a cursor but it doesn't
| appear that way on the other side, and cursor tracking is
| extremely laggy and jumpy on the remote side despite my red
| cursor that's giving me the impression of a laser pointer
| equivalent.
|
| 5. When someone is screen sharing, the controls for what to
| do with the video of others are not very good. Order is
| non-deterministic (afaik), not easily changed, provides few
| layouts, and not easily hidden.
|
| 6. When screen sharing I'm given a large list of all my
| windows to choose from. They're in effectively a random
| order (not alphabetical, not by z-index on my Mac, etc),
| and the mini photo of them are usually unintelligible and
| difficult to pin point the one I want.
|
| These are just some of the bad UX that I encounter daily in
| work usage. I could probably come up with a list of 10+
| more issues without even thinking much about it, and we
| haven't even touched the "interface" level issues (eg
| actual design).
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I am not sure you can answer a subjective assessment with a
| blanket dismissal - obviously at some level the webex UI
| can't be completely unusable (lots of people do use it),
| but apparently some people just don't like it. It has what
| strikes me as an unpleasant installer (like BlueJeans, it
| seems to only work if you download an installer and run it
| for every call, which seems excessive somehow).
| finnh wrote:
| 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"
| fouc wrote:
| > Despite its significance, there has not been any systematic
| study characterizing the user-perceived performance of existing
| videoconferencing systems other than anecdotal reports.
|
| > 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.
|
| Seems like a very useful study at first glance!
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