🕴🏿 🆖 🧣 Video conferencing is easy and free 💩 📕 🕠

Due to the sharply increased popularity of remote work, we decided to offer a video conferencing service. Like most of our other services, it is free. In order not to reinvent the wheel, the foundation is built on an open-source solution. The main part is based on WebRTC, which allows you to talk in the browser simply by reference. I will write about the opportunities that we offer and some of the problems I encountered below.

In early March, we decided to offer our customers a video conference. We tested several options, to speed up the launch and maximize the functions, we chose the ready-made open-source solution Jitsi meet. They already wrote about him on the hub, so here I won’t open America. But we, of course, did not just deploy and install it. And they adjusted and added part of the functions.

Feature List

We offer a standard set of jitsi functionality + minor improvements and integration with the existing telephony system.

High quality WebRTC calls
Ssl encryption (not yet p2p, but Habr already wrote that it could be soon)
Clients for ios / android
Increasing the security level of the conference: creating a link, setting a password in the Zadarma personal account (the creator is a moderator). That is, not like in jitsi - where, whoever came first was the main one.
Simple text chat in the conference
Ability to demonstrate the screen and Youtube videos
Integration with IP-telephony: the ability to connect to the conference by phone

In the near future it is also planned to add recording and broadcasting of conferences on Youtube.

How to use?

Extremely simple:

We go to the conference page (if there is no account - register )
Create a room (we also recommend setting a password).
We give everyone a link and communicate.

For mobile devices, you need to install a mobile client (they are available in the AppStore and Google Play), for a computer, just open the link in a browser. If you suddenly do not have Internet access, you can call and dial the conference PIN.

Why do I need you? I'll set up Jitsi myself

If you have the resources of time and desire, then why not? But the first thing we recommend paying attention to is the openness of Jitsi . If you use the conference for business, then it can be harmful. “Out of the box” jitsi creates a conference via any link that he was contacted, the moderator and the ability to set a password are given to the person who first logged in, there are no restrictions on creating other conferences.
Thus, it is easier to create a server “for everyone” than for yourself. But then you can find one of the ready-made options, now the network already has at least several open jitsi servers.
But in the case of the server “for all” issues arise with load and balancing. In our case, we have already solved the load and scaling problem (it already works on several servers, adding new ones takes a couple of hours if necessary).
Also, in order to avoid peak loads from unknown users (or just DDOS), there are limits.

What are the limitations?

Video Conference Limits:

1 room for up to 10 participants - for registered users.
2 rooms for 20 participants - after replenishment of the account (at least once every six months) - that is, for current Zadarma customers.
5 rooms with 50 participants each - for clients working with the Office package.
10 rooms of 100 participants - for customers working with the Corporation package.

But most browsers and computers can adequately display up to 60-70 people in a conference. For more, we recommend either broadcasting on youtube or using integration with a conference call.

Telephony Integration

Despite the additional services, Zadarma is primarily a telephone operator. Therefore, it is natural that we added integration with the existing telephone system.

Thanks to the integration, you can connect audio and video conferences (both through the free Zadarma PBX and through your own client PBX, if any). Just dial SIP 00300 and enter the PIN, which is indicated under the link to the conference room.
In Zadarm PBX you can create a voice conference (adding people to it by dialing 000) and add a “participant” with number 00300 to it.
It is also possible to connect to the conference by calling the telephone number (numbers are available in 40 countries and 20 cities of the Russian Federation).

Why do we need this?

This is not the first or last service that Zadarma offers for free. Previously proposed: PBX , CRM , Callback widget, Calltracking, Callme widget. The goal is only one - to attract customers, so that some of them acquire paid services (virtual numbers, outgoing calls). That is, we try to invest instead of advertising in the development of free products. Free services have already helped attract more than 1.6 million customers, we continue our successful practice now.

PSAs you can see, we have already gone through the "rake" of balancing, fault tolerance, and additional security settings. In addition, there was a lot of minor tuning and debug, including Russification really translated into Russian (and 4 other languages). We tried to make integration with VoIP as convenient as possible. Moderation of applications for Android / iOS drank a separate portion of blood (but not in vain, Android crossed the bar of 1000 installations in one week).
You can try to set up your server, or use our free conference.
Any suggestions for further refinement of the videoconference, or the development of other free products, are welcome in the comments.