Zingaya sends audio data via the Internet connection and the quality of the connection may vary during a call. Most of the time the caller doesn’t know about his internet connection problems, until he starts hearing audio quality degradation (like audio dropouts). It’s a good idea to show him the info regarding the network connection problems (before he becomes angry )
We created special network quality indicator to address this issue, now the caller can see his network connection quality in real-time. The indicator looks like WiFi connection icon (most people are familiar with it nowadays) and works in the same way – if packet loss increases it changes color and show less bars, if packet loss decreases it becomes green and shows more bars. You can see it on the screenshots below.
Technical details
This part of the post is for our readers who would like to learn more regarding the implementation of this function. The network quality monitoring subsystem measures packet loss (only when data sent over UDP – for sRTP and RTMFP protocols) and then sends this data back to the widget. In WebRTC version of the widget RTCP protocol capabilities are used. We are analyzing the outgoing stream packets (from the widget), since uplink is usually a weak spot.