IMHO this is exactly right. VOIP is actually super hard unless you have extremely good equipment because any latency can trip up things like echo cancellation. On top of that, you have to consider that this equipment (and its bandwidth) that is doing nothing but carrying traffic is seen to be a cost centre by organisations. Most VOIP calls result in practically no revenue. The bean counters will make decisions without understanding the impact to the service.
This was always the big advantage of Skype. Yes, supernodes are problematic (and IMHO, unethical), but on average they will work better than carrying all the traffic. When I used to work at Nortel in the 90's (now defunct telecom equipment manufacturer), I always wondered about VOIP because I knew how much trouble we had with traffic and we had circuit switched networks! Later when I worked for some VOIP startups, I could see the problems first hand.
FWIW, for voice, Mumble is still the gold standard IMHO. It's a pain to set up, but once you do, it will work extremely well. I keep threatening to build an open source VOIP system (not based on SIP, and requiring users to open ports by hand) because it's really not that hard. I've built one before for a startup from the ground up in a matter of months, by myself. Maybe one of these days...
This was always the big advantage of Skype. Yes, supernodes are problematic (and IMHO, unethical), but on average they will work better than carrying all the traffic. When I used to work at Nortel in the 90's (now defunct telecom equipment manufacturer), I always wondered about VOIP because I knew how much trouble we had with traffic and we had circuit switched networks! Later when I worked for some VOIP startups, I could see the problems first hand.
FWIW, for voice, Mumble is still the gold standard IMHO. It's a pain to set up, but once you do, it will work extremely well. I keep threatening to build an open source VOIP system (not based on SIP, and requiring users to open ports by hand) because it's really not that hard. I've built one before for a startup from the ground up in a matter of months, by myself. Maybe one of these days...