Re: [rtcweb] Agenda time request for draft-marjou-rtcweb-audio-codecs-for-interop-01

['Ron' <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 10:37:45AM -0400, Bogineni, Kalyani wrote:
> There are 6.4 billion cellular connections worldwide.
> 
> http://www.3gpp.org/3GPP-Family-2012-Statistics

Sure.  And why do you think that someone with one of those devices,
who wanted to call someone on the legacy network that didn't have
a WebRTC service, would want to do it by going via a WebRTC gateway
service, that they would presumably have to pay extra for, and would
suffer extra hops of latency to use (even without transcoding), when
they could just, you know, call them on their cell phone normally ... ?

Trying to optimise for a case that nobody would actually ever really
use, that only guarantees poorer and more expensive results than using
either WebRTC or their phone as it was actually intended, doesn't seem
like a useful thing to focus on at this stage - let alone something we
need to 'mandate' to create an 'incentive' for.

The people who need this don't need a mandate, and the people who can't
use it are going to (have to) ignore it and none of their users will
ever notice.  That doesn't sound like any sort of mandate material to me.

Or like something that hinges on the number of legacy phones at all
for that matter.

  Ron


> Regards,
> Kalyani Bogineni
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of Ron
> Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2013 10:28 AM
> To: Xavier Marjou; [e-mail]
> Subject: Re: [rtcweb] Agenda time request for draft-marjou-rtcweb-audio-codecs-for-interop-01
> 
> 
> Hi Xavier,
> 
> On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 09:14:30AM -0400, Xavier Marjou wrote:
> > Here is a summary of the 
> > draft-marjou-rtcweb-audio-codecs-for-interop-00
> > presentation that I had prepared for yesterday's session:
> > 
> > - The co-authors want to underline that non-WebRTC voice endpoints 
> > usually use one of the following codecs: AMR, AMR-WB or G.722, which 
> > will result in massive transcoding when there will be communications 
> > between WebRTC endpoints and non-WebRTC endpoints.
> 
> "Massive" seems a little overstated here.  Any system providing a gateway service to or between 'low bandwidth' devices is almost surely going to support more than just WebRTC, and is going to have to transcode for most or all of them anyway.  Adding an extra burden to WebRTC, especially one that would only ever apply to some small subset of users, wouldn't appear to make a significant difference in the requirements for such a system.
> 
> 
> > - On one side, transcoding is bad for many reasons discussed in the 
> > draft (cost issues, intrinsic quality degradation, degraded 
> > interactivity, fallback from HD to G.711...);
> 
> Are you aware of the listening tests presented to the CODEC WG?
> 
> In particular the ones that show Opus->AMR and AMR->Opus is not significantly worse than the intrinsic quality degradation suffered by using AMR alone?
> 
> Or that Opus->G.711->AMR is actually better than AMR->G.711->AMR ?
> 
> 
> > - On the other side, it is recognized that implementing additional 
> > codecs in the browsers can generate additional costs.
> > 
> > - In order to reach a compromise, we would like to add some text in 
> > the WG draft draft-ietf-rtcweb-audio providing incentives for the 
> > browser to use these three codecs: make them mandatory to implement 
> > when there is no cost impact on the browser (e.g. if codec already 
> > installed, paid by the device vendor...).
> 
> Since there is never no cost impact to supporting additional features, that would imply this is never mandatory ...
> 
> In which case why bother half-saying otherwise?
> 
> I thought it was already quite clear all along, that people who want to or have their own good reasons to are free to implement any other codecs they please - and that they already have, and certainly will continue to do so?
> 
> > Any opinion on that?
> 
> I don't really see much point to handwaving about particular niche codecs for particular niche uses unless this is going to be some sort of separate informational document, that is kept up to date with changes in all the niches that people have an interest in.
> 
> That might be useful.  But 'mandating' something that the people who will do it were going to do it anyway, and the people who were not are still not going to do, doesn't seem to add any real value here to either users or implementers.  It won't explain anything to anybody that they don't already know if it is of any interest to them.
> 
>  Cheers,
>  Ron
> 
> 
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