Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act

It works really well.

One that has been a total game changer for my company is when I'm hosting a conference call, I can simply "Invite by Phone" my participants. They get a phone call, are prompted to "Press 1 to enter the conference", and boom they're in. It's drastically reduced people fumbling around with phone numbers + participant codes, ending up in the wrong meeting, or getting stuck in some unnecessary software install loop. If someone is more than two minutes late, they're getting a phone call that brings them instantly into the meeting.

Also a really nice feature, again for phone conferences, is when people dial-in I see their phone number handle in the UI. But during the call as they introduce themselves or I look up their number, I can then rename their user to something recognizable. Now if I'm on a call with 5 people at another firm, I appear really impressive because I know who each person is by their name. When someone is speaking on the conference call, their icon lights up. If someone has a ton of background noise I can easily mute them.

Zoom Phone (addl paid feature) is awesome too. Virtual phone numbers, IVR, call routing, busy hours, I can instantly turn a 1:1 conversation into a zoom meeting that other people can join, etc. Zoom Phone works on my iphone like a regular dialer, and I can place/receive fully digital calls on it (pretty similar to how Google Voice works), so it doesn't matter if I have actual cell service.

I've never used Microsoft Teams, and does look really snazzy, but Zoom is an absolute joy to use compared to every single other conferencing software I have ever used. The video chat and screensharing is fast and responsive and just works exactly like you would expect it to.

Yep. It just works. First time use is nearly instant.

WebEx always took a while to on-board.

> It works really well.

Does it?

Asking because I just left a zoom meeting with horrible sound quality and extremely bad video quality. Why would anyone prefer that to Teams is beyond me.

Edit: interesting this is _heavily_ downvoted. Can't a person have a bad experience and tell HN about it?

Zoom Phone has been a game changer.

1 of the 2 big cell phone networks we have: Rogers, is regularly failing to connect calls during peak hours for the past week. Being able to do digital calls has changed a lot, and probably took a load off their network.

(I say 2 big networks because Bell and Telus share tower infrastructure, Dunno where it separates out again, possibly just billing.)

Zoom tells me I have no audio devices and need to reboot every time I launch it. I ignore the message and it magically works fine. Great piece of software /s

I have about a year of near daily anecdotal evidence to the contrary. So, in my experience, yes it works extremely well. I'm not saying it's better than Teams at all, I've never used that, and it looks pretty awesome from their marketing page. Microsoft has really stepped up their software quality game recently.

I can say Zoom is way the hell better than: Slack/Screenhero, TeamViewer, join.me, GoToMeeting, WebEx, Skype, Google Hangouts, BlueJeans, ugh the list goes on over the past years.

But your flawless experience does not help me.

I had a horrible meeting today (not the first time, but today was particularly bad).

In fact, I recorded part of it with my phone and tomorrow I Will have a chat with our IT people to ask people to avoid using zoom.

I believe Zoom Phone is a whitelabel of RingCentral

Having used zoom, teams, skype for business, webex, and many others ... zoom is the only one of these which just works. I'm on the con calls typically 5+ hours a day. Yes, it is soul crushing.

Teams sorta works, though it often messes up with devices. Headsets and speakers (I've got a Jabra speak 710). Often times it handles contention badly.

Skype ... yeah. The less said the better.

Webex. Must be marketing for Zoom and others, given how unreservedly horrible the UX is.

I've also used uberconference some years ago. Almost as good as zoom.

I am looking at containerized ways to run zoom to restrict its access to my system, but it is the best IMO, by far.

[edit] I should note that I've also used Viber a bit. Less now though. Mostly for calling home from overseas. Not great for conferencing though.

Their About Us page makes no mention whatsoever of technology. There is no CTO, no VP Engineering, etc. Quite odd. If they were relabeling something else, that could explain it.

> Can't a person have a bad experience and tell HN about it?

Not necessarily, no. It's downvoted because it's one low-evidence anecdote amidst comments from people who've been using it daily (two years, here). That doesn't mean it didn't happen, but without supporting evidence it's difficult to find relevance in a single poor call.

Some basic evidentiary questions for you to consider, that would help distinguish between "someone's Internet was broken" (more likely) and "Zoom is defective" (less likely), for example:

1) Was only one participant experiencing issues, or were all participants blurry? Did Zoom warn you that of connection instability? Did Zoom show yellow or red connection status bars for the affected participant(s)?

2) Does your (or their) Internet connection show instability such as high latency (Bufferbloat) when performing a speed test capable of measuring and reporting latency-under-load fluctuations? https://dslreports.com/speedtest

3) Did the sound quality issue involving one or more participants who were not using in-ear or over-ear headphones?

4) Was the sound quality issue reproducible in a followup call for testing? Was it reproducible using "call in by phone" audio rather than "internet" audio for testing?

EDIT:

5) If you stop sharing your video, does the problem improve? If you activate screen sharing, does the problem worsen?

Honestly UberConference works way better...

"I Will have a chat with our IT people to ask people to avoid using zoom." Foolish. What works better combining VTC and easy join phone calls? Surely not Teams. Was on a 400+ person Zoom call that went great. Problem is likely in your network.

Why are you assuming that the Zoom software was the culprit? Perhaps you had an unstable connection with high jitter?

Another pretty great thing with Zoom is that it'll keep a call up even if, say, your home internet drops out and you switch to tethering on your phone. It sounds rare, but with Australian internet or dodgy campus wifi, this is a really useful feature.

Not to present any kind of “whatabouts” or whatever, just speaking truth to power:

You’d be shocked (maybe) how much White-labeling and reselling there is in the communications/“unified” communications and presence space.

Especially now in the age of programmable voice.

Yes we transitioned from Webex + Lync + Skype + Cisco phones to just Zoom and it is amazing (aside from privacy breaches of course). Conferencing is a pain and Zoom solves a lot of existing issue in that area so companies recognize this, especially when people in change also use conference software :) .

But if you downvote anything that is not compatible with your own experience, where does that leave us?

To answer your other questions: this was not the first time and there are others here expressing similar issues. Teams works reasonably well from same computer & network.

Because other teleconferencing software worked just fine under the same condition.

out of curiosity, why not Teams?

If you’d included that second paragraph in your anecdote, I personally wouldn’t have downvoted it.

Well I think this a standard feature of conference call software, you can quit and re-join at any time.

Teams is way better than Skype, provided everyone is on a computer.

>One that has been a total game changer for my company is when I'm hosting a conference call, I can simply "Invite by Phone" my participants. They get a phone call, are prompted to "Press 1 to enter the conference", and boom they're in. It's drastically reduced people fumbling around with phone numbers + participant codes, ending up in the wrong meeting, or getting stuck in some unnecessary software install loop. If someone is more than two minutes late, they're getting a phone call that brings them instantly into the meeting.

Why on earth are people needing to make POTS phone calls to join a meeting? Not only is the audio of vastly inferior quality, the information isn't being kept secure AND they can't see anything being presented.

Instead, why not shoot them a link so they can just click it and be in the meeting? That's how it SHOULD work, but that's not how it DOES work with Zoom (unless you engage in tomfoolery to make like you're trying but failing to install the software, and only then do you get a link to join via browser — but then then you get a deliberately-crippled experience because fuck you).

No, you've missed the point - you don't quit and rejoin, it just freaking stays up. It's really remarkable - I can switch networks and VPNs on my macbook any time during a screensharing session and get nothing more than a slight delay for a second on video, and zero perceptible drop on audio.

For one, Teams doesn't include dial-in/dial-out, that's another $1.50 per month per line (still cheaper than Zoom if you have Office 365 already).

But another, more important one is: the last time we tried using Teams/S4B meetings, if you are contacting a client where they are in a different Office 365 tenant, and the security settings are turned up on their tenant to not allow logging in as a "guest" to other tenants, they can't join your meeting. (or at least, not without launching an incognito window and reopening the meeting link) Azure AD tries to login as their user account, fails because they aren't allowed, and leaves them on an error message screen without any way for the meeting host to troubleshoot. Zoom, since it's out of band of anything that IT usually touches (unless you turn on the "only allow people in my organization to join this meeting" function), won't have this issue since the outsider will automatically be offered the choice of logging into a Zoom account or just giving a name for this conversation (as far as I've seen).

It's one of those scenarios where Microsoft being so entrenched in the environment actually lessens productivity. You can argue that people shouldn't be blocked from joining outside meetings, or that shadow IT is evil and should never be encouraged, but when security steps in the way of productivity, shadow IT usually naturally results, as so many SaaS vendors (Zoom, Basecamp, Dropbox) rely upon. Zoom acts like malware (to a degree) by installing to user-only directories and working around corporate security to make it easier for the end user to use the product. At a big company, approval for a video conferencing system could take months of PoCs, vendor meetings, implementation, and so on. But if you can just say "Join my Zoom meeting! It takes a minute! It integrates with Outlook so we don't have to even go to another website! And it's cheap!", then all of the corporate BS is cut through, and by time IT finds out, half the company is using it and they'll start paying for it so the enterprise stuff works (i.e. SSO).

(Basecamp is another good example of this. It gets tons of adoption by running in a browser window and only costing $99 per month for unlimited users, so it fits on a manager's expense account and user onboarding is super simple from there. and it's really easy to use.)

I'm not sure about remarkable, it's a quality of implementation issue. Around the turn of the century I worked on an EU project where we did this for voice calls with IPv6.

In the present era QUIC can support doing this, although whether that'll be something every popular implementation actually does remains to be seen, but again a high quality implementation will be able to just rebind - "Hi, this is still me, I just have a different network address now" and carry on seamlessly.

Zoom also has a good Linux client. It's been the least frictive option amongst the well-known conferencing apps with clients for me.

>One that has been a total game changer for my company is when I'm hosting a conference call, I can simply "Invite by Phone" my participants. They get a phone call, are prompted to "Press 1 to enter the conference", and boom they're in.

Jitsi Meet has this feature

How exactly is this "speaking truth to power"?

As an aside, I hate that phrase. I get it, but i find it cringe-inducing.

Have you tried Jitsi Meet?

Jitsi Meet is open-source and self hostable. Conspicuously absent from your list :)

It's also very good at handling connection slowdowns. It will drop video first, while audio keeps flowing. If someone loses their connection altogether, it buffers their voice, and plays it back slightly faster to catch up (sounds weird, but it really works).

Good if you are not trying to do some weird stuff like, god forbid, fractional scaling on wayland.

They do have a partership. I know RingCentral whilelabels Zoom for video, so maybe vice versa for phone.

https://www.ringcentral.com/whyringcentral/company/pressrele...

I'd argue this is more of an issue with wayland than zoom. Wayland seems to break many things from what I've read.

I use linuxmint, so largely, I don't run into these issues.

I say it as a telecom industry insider watching the industry cannabalize itself in the chase for margins because of over-provisioning and terrible self-regulation of reseller and whitelabel programs, and even poorer regulation of service delivery.

This isn't a critique of reselling or whitelabelling a communications platform that provides good value; it's just that there are a LOT of bottom-feeders latched on and hiding in the tangled web of resold trunks and bulk-purchased DIDs wreaking a lot of financial havoc.

I speak of course, to robocallers/robotexters and their kin, which are not new problems but have only been amplified when access to the public switching network became as easy as 'buy a voice over IP DID for twenty-five cents'. I am however curious to see the impact of SHAKEN/STIR.

This all to speak nothing of toll fraud committed via compromised SIP trunks (most often due to poorly configured Asterisk instances setup so an MSP in BFE can say "we sell phones"). Preserving the names of the involved parties but I have seen bills for some consulting clients that reached beyond six figures from one month of toll fraud. The culprit? The office had bought a "PBX in a box" from a local vendor, who only configured it enough to get a dial tone and a phone number from randomly registered CLEC, connected the thing to the public internet, and walked off with a hefty paycheck.

The FCC doesn't really get off the hook here either, while there are requirements and guidelines for inter-connectivity to the public switching network, enforcement is-or in my own anecdotal experience since 2001, non-existent sans making sure you've paid your USF dues. I'm open to correction on this point, if anyone has experience on the matter I'm curious to know what the interaction was like; the rest is mindless opinion.

Taking this last point a bit further and bringing it all home: You could very easily start a "phone company" in rural Georgia with pretty low comparative overhead and sell phones service to an entire community and trivially disappear overnight before the Feds even glanced in your direction with more money than you put into it. Left improperly secured, the robocallers just found a new forward operating base.

If anything I'm aiming to point at the (perhaps unintended) results of making telecom so easy, in a way we created these problems, this is the bed we've made for ourselves in the industry.

haha - if you agree to do technical support for all the people fumbling around with other clients - they MIGHT say yes.

One reason zoom is POPULAR with the IT folks - less tech support / help desk stuff. Test my audio is the biggest tip for folks stuck.

This exactly.

What's really funny is if a VP says, we should start evaluating enterprise conferencing software, get's down the road with the webex and friends sales teams, and then everyone tells them to go home because it's too late when they finally have the roll-out meeting or the feedback meeting - everyone is using zoom already.

Absolutely not! We pay for both. Uberconference has higher latency (test with a click track inside your office with two phones on a call).

Contention on uberconference is MUCH worse when two people are speaking. You get that weird halting sorry I spoke on top of you effect.

(This subthread was originally in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22703219)