Ubuntu
ekiga package

  1. Bug #178743
  2. Comment #3

Comment 3 for bug 178743

Revision history for this message
Yannick Defais (sevmek) wrote : Re: support for symmetric NAT

Hi,

It is in some way related to #338267. But, as pointed out, it require technical abilities and even if you have them, in some case you just can't get through the NAT.

The best solution is indeed a SIP proxy. But, Martin, you should consider symmetric NAT is a minority of NAT. What you propose is setting the "outbound proxy" in Ekiga as something like "voip.ubuntu.com". This will affect every Ekiga user, thus this will use much more bandwidth than necessary. Beside, the counter part of using a proxy is getting higher latency.

Fortunately, there is a practical solution for this issue: ICE
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-mmusic-ice-19

You still need a SIP proxy, but ICE is "intelligent" enough to check if you really need it, thus this will only use the bandwidth if necessary.

ICE is planned to be implemented in Ekiga. I'm almost sure upstream (the Ekiga team) will raise up the priority for this feature if Ubuntu accept to give a SIP proxy to the community, and I bet upstream will help setting/administrate this proxy if required. I'm close to them, if Canonical needs further informations, feel free to ask.

Regards,
Yannick