Comment 4 for bug 178743

Hi,

> 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.

You are right: It should only be used as a last resort.

> 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.

Ekiga is already able to detect a symmetric NAT, in this case
a default proxy should be used.

> 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.

I hope somebody from Canonical is listening. A free and standard
compliant VOIP solution which works out of the box for all users
is one of the things painfully missing on the Linux Desktop.

Martin