Hi folks,

My shanty group tried an online 'shout' (12 people) on Thursday on Zoom. Worked great for social chat but was a complete car crash when we tried to sing even the most basic song, because of the latency. Everyone was on fixed-line broadband, I think, and it seemed to affect everyone.

FWIW when I'm not shantying I also happen to be a software engineer specialising in real-time media (but I don't have a magic bullet, sorry!). Warning, tech stuff...

Latency in conferencing comes from:

- Encoding delays, particularly for video (we did try turning video off but it didn't help much)
- Transmission delays to the relay point and back (ping times)
- Protocol delays due to TCP retries (if used, may be UDP)
- Decoding delays

I think DaveRo above hits the nail on the head - the connections are all joining somewhere other than London then there's going to be much more latency. I guess I could capture and traceroute to find out...

What would be needed to do it right would be an audio-only system using a low-latency codec, either rendezvousing at a local server or in a direct mesh network using UDP (with STUN/TURN). The latter would halve the latency but it's far more complex to create (and relies on N-times upstream bandwidth, which many people might not have). I wonder if anyone has done this?

I'm continuing to research...