you can make very cheap to maintain peer to peer solutions
you can use a STUN server to discover your public IP and use a method called UDP hole punching to open a port others can connect to. STUN servers are very cheap to run: they don’t actually handle the data; just provide a kind of handshake service in the middle for coordinating
this is often used for peer to peer video chat etc
there are public STUN servers: just like DNS, STUN is a fairly critical part of modern infrastructure
peer to peer real time video is a fairly solved problem. the fact that we have google/amazon/zoom/etc in the middle isn’t because it’s necessary
that having been said, STUN servers are also incredibly cheap to run… i wouldn’t consider it exactly off the cards for a company that’s selling products to support a public STUN server indefinitely… it’s not quite as simple as them having to pay tens of thousands /mo in infrastructure costs to keep the lights on: it’s more like $100/mo, which at numbers that small you’d make back in just interest on the sales you made… but i reckon it could go something like “support for 10 years” and then they release an update that lets you set your own STUN server; perhaps defaulting to a public, free one
you can make very cheap to maintain peer to peer solutions
you can use a STUN server to discover your public IP and use a method called UDP hole punching to open a port others can connect to. STUN servers are very cheap to run: they don’t actually handle the data; just provide a kind of handshake service in the middle for coordinating
this is often used for peer to peer video chat etc
I’m sure you can. Do you think that’s what they expect their users to do? Or that it’s something they’re going to facilitate?
there are public STUN servers: just like DNS, STUN is a fairly critical part of modern infrastructure
peer to peer real time video is a fairly solved problem. the fact that we have google/amazon/zoom/etc in the middle isn’t because it’s necessary
that having been said, STUN servers are also incredibly cheap to run… i wouldn’t consider it exactly off the cards for a company that’s selling products to support a public STUN server indefinitely… it’s not quite as simple as them having to pay tens of thousands /mo in infrastructure costs to keep the lights on: it’s more like $100/mo, which at numbers that small you’d make back in just interest on the sales you made… but i reckon it could go something like “support for 10 years” and then they release an update that lets you set your own STUN server; perhaps defaulting to a public, free one