Shame on the telcos who prevent residential customers from using the internet as intended. If everyone was given an IPV6 address block and freedom to accept outside connections from anywhere, none of this would be an issue.

>freedom to accept outside connections from anywhere

Without NAT from home gateways (like consumer routers) preventing inbound connections from the internet, security would be far more of a nightmare than it is today. Requiring that people manually forward specific ports is the best way to handle it. We would be seeing news about Blaster-like worms pretty much every week of the past 20 years, otherwise.

Also, even if it were a good idea, this still wouldn't solve the problem at all. The NAT-traversing capability of Zoom and other products is like 0.01% of the value they provide. You still need good software.

agree on telcos preventing ppl from using internet as intended, but we'd still need good and easy to use videoconferencing software

MS Teams is pretty good, but it's Microsoft so people aren't using it as much. Which is understandable.

And it runs on Ubuntu! To be honest I'd rather not use software made or hosted on US/Chinese/Russian soil but I don't really have much choice at my workplace. If it didn't ran on Ubuntu I'd dual boot to windows just for meetings.

This would be a great time for some proper European alternatives.

Teams and Hangouts have the same problem -- they are hard to set up.

Zoom "just works". My in-laws joined a Zoom conference without help. There is no way they would have figured out Hangouts or Teams.

Yeah, totally agree. Our company uses Zoom. I'm happy enough with it. I've been forced to use MS Teams though, and I actually like it a fair bit.

And yet, almost nobody has commented on this sad state of affairs. You'd think there would be plenty of healthy competition in this space, but there is none. Why not?