At Climáximo we are wondering about the feasibility and security of trying to provide phone numbers to people with little or no internet access so they can join conference calls on BigBlueButton.
I understand that concern, but I have a few issues to raise.
I’m not very well informed on the security implications of that. But from the little I read from the BBB documentation there is the possibility of us exposing the telephony endpoint to bad actors. Even with the firewall configuration in their docs, via IP spoofing, an attacker could still reach out to our endpoint by spoofing it’s address with the provider’s.
The other problem is that we’d be exposing the conversations to the telephony provider. And potentially though the whole network path (I don’t know if voice calls are encrypted when going though IP - I should probably read up on that).
Furthermore, it seems to me that it’s not configurable on a room-by-room basis, so we would potentially exposing all the rooms of our BigBlueButton.
Anyhow, this is just my assessment. Other’s opinions might differ.
As a temporary solution, in order to allow those members you might do a voice-only conference. One where no webcams or screens are shared that should make it very tolerable even in low internet conditions. And you could still use the whiteboard for presentation and and drawing. So the meeting’s interactivity should not be affected too much.
It sounds like this would be difficult to secure, or at the least that we would need to set up our own instance of BBB specifically for this use case so as not to be exposing other rooms.
In the case of people who have no internet connection, perhaps the best compromise for us at this stage would be to use zoom instead, although their dial-in rates seem to be quite expensive… If anyone could suggest an alternative it would be much appreciated!
Hum. It’s sad that some people get left out because of this or that the alternative is zoom.
The only other solution I can come up at this time, is the low-tech one which is someone putting one phone over the other (inverted) - mic of one facing speakers of other. And one has a group telephone call and the other one is linked to BBB.
Then in order to join, people with no internet can call that number.
I’m not sure if the sound is any good. There might be more elegant solutions to do that, but I was unable to find them.
Yet another alternative is doing chat-only meetings like the good old IRC days.
Sometimes low-tech is best That certainly sounds viable for one-off situations, and much better than an expensive zoom call.
I wonder if any tools exist to pipe call audio to your phone’s browser? Like Virtual Audio Cable for android…
Or… would it possible to connect to a BBB room on a headless raspberry pi (like, a 10€ Pi Zero W for example), and then use it as a bluetooth headset for your phone?
