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Comment by ranger_danger | Hacker News Reader

IMO This has the same problems inherent to WebRTC itself, which is that a large percentage of users in the world are behind symmetric or CG NAT and so TURN relay servers are needed, but never actually defined by the application, because there are no good free ones. Personally I've never been able to use any WebRTC-enabled service for this reason, nor anyone else I know.

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Good, free TURN servers probably don't exist because the protocol is basically open proxy as a service --- who wants to run that without limits?

But something like this is a selective forwarder, so as long as you can find someplace to host it that can get an ip:port to listen on, all your users/compatriots should be able to connect to it, and you're ready to go.

There are free VPN services though. But yes you're right, I forgot to qualify my statement saying that I was referring to bidirectional WebRTC... which I had assumed the author was referring to as well since they explicitly mentioned "WebRTC comes with P2P technology".

My public instance runs on a world addressable host and doesn't have TURN. I have no problem using it from my phone and it is behind a CG NAT. No TURN/Relay servers are needed.

> I've never been able to use any WebRTC-enabled service for this reason, nor anyone else I know

Is this a browser/agent issue? You aren't able to use Google Meet or Zoom in the browser?

Live-streaming in one direction doesn't need a relay because the users aren't uploading... And google/zoom use their own relays.

Google doesn't use any STUN/TURN servers I just went and confirmed. The following is the RTCPeerConfiguration used.

```

https://meet.google.com/***-***-\*\*, { iceServers: [], iceTransportPolicy: all, bundlePolicy: max-bundle, rtcpMuxPolicy: require, iceCandidatePoolSize: 0 },

```

It may not use it if you don't explicitly need it, there could be out-of-band detection that adds a TURN server or some other OOB relay if it's needed. I've also seen comments online that say Chrome in particular can support TCP for WebRTC which would negate the need for a relay (as normally only DTLS over UDP is used). But based on my understanding of how WebRTC and NAT works, using the typical UDP approach for bidirectional communication over symmetric or CGNAT absolutely should not work, barring some other method of NAT traversal such as a browser-based UPnP client or such.

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