Video and Audio Call Limit

[drale2k]

• I have seen https://docs.wire.com/ and https://github.com/wireapp/wire-server-deploy - the documentation there does not answer my question.

My question:
The documentation and website claims that Video Calls are restricted to 4 participants, and Audio Calls to 10. I'd like to ask what causes this limitation and if it is feasible to have a Video Call with up to 10-12 people. Is this something that can be configured or is it a deeper rooted, technical limitation?

[Promaethius]

I too am interested in increasing the participant limit for on-prem installations.

[jschaul]

Currently, for N participants, there are connections established between participants. So for 10 participants, there are 45 connections established, which require individual encryption/decryption and enough upstream/downstream bandwidth (every participant needs to encrypt/decrypt individually for every other participant and upload/download 9 streams). In case one of those 45 connections breaks, some person will no longer hear/see one other person, while other people are unaware of the problem. So unless all participants have really good hardware and really good internet connections, there will be problems.
Furthermore, the display can only show 4 video tiles I think.

That being said, feel free to tweak https://github.com/wireapp/wire-web-config-default/blob/master/wire-webapp/.env.defaults#L84 (add something to envVars: under the webapp: section for helm var overrides) and see what happens.

We're aware of this problem, and a solution to allow more participants (keeping end-to-end-encryption) without laptops melting is being worked on.

[drale2k]

Thank you very much of the great answer. What is the approach currently being worked? Some kind of MCU or SFU?

[mheinzel]

SFU, as MCUs don't work well with end-to-end encryption.

We're hoping to make this work using WebRTC Insertable Streams once they stabilize.