Posted Dec 3, 2012 18:47 UTC (Mon) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093)
In reply to: Ekiga 4.0 released by gwolf
Parent article: Ekiga 4.0 released
STUN is a complete disaster - it does a trick which most better firewalls (including shorewall, but excluding most consumer routers) manage to block. Worse, you can often end up with only one side of the RTP connection working, so having simplex audio, or no video. Finally, some routers play tricks on top of tricks - this means that a router might do the necessary siproxd stuff for the audio part, but not for the video part!
The reason it's necessary is because the central SIP registration server can easily handle the bandwidth for who is online and call-setup, but not for the actual call (it would make it really expensive for eg ekiga.org, and it would add latency).