Exact same problem. You still have too many encoders (one per outgoing stream). And too much bitrate on the uplink.

Haven’t seen any mesh solution that works well in production for voice or video calls. Sorry…

If I look at costs, then Agora prices its voice calling service at $0.00099/minute

Thanks Tsahi, this is very interesting. Do you know of any products / open-source solutions that rely on a mesh for their multiparty audio-only calls?

Any idea how much an SFU costs to run – e.g. supporting a million minutes of 4-person audio calls?

Kani,

I don’t know… I’d assume 10 or so users should be possible. You’d start dealing with instabilities on slow connections that would crap the experience more than it would for media servers probably, but should be doable.

That said, most don’t care that much since doing group calling in the cloud using mixing is considered quite a common solution and not too expensive. You can also use an SFU, which Discord were capable of deploying at some serious scale of 100s of users in a call.

You make a lot of good points