I’m one of the sysadmin in the Tor Project, and we’ve been using meet.coop’s BBB instance with great success for all sorts of things:
- all hands, ad-hoc, or weekly team meetings
- training sessions
- “office hours”
- “demo days”
- hack week
It is working great! Sometimes we have people in South America that have trouble getting through on audio, but I’m not sure it’s due to BBB or the link… Hard to tell…
Now to answer your questions directly…
i’d say half a dozen to a dozen or so. Our largest meetings are between 30 to 50 people, I think, and I’d say we’d typically have 5-6 people in the largest meeting on phone. But who knows?
Absolutely, that would work great for us.
I have not tested SIPdroid itself. I have used the built-in SIP dialer that’s part of the stock Android “Phone” app (which, amazingly, is often missing from commercial Android deployments: it’s part of LineageOS and CalyxOS for example)… It works fine for my purposes.
I’d be happy to test a SIP endpoint if that’s useful. I use baresip on my desktop…
For business hosting, particularly in Canada, I recommend https://voip.ms, which has good service and pricing. I don’t think you’d need to setup Asterisk, to be honest: in theory freeswitch is a complete replacement and can do routing and all that stuff. I’d advise against it, actually: having two PBX systems to learn will make training your staff needlessly hard.
For me, the killer feature is to be able to bridge audio from my computer into BBB without firing up a web browser that eats all those precious computer resources and power. During office hours, I have a browser window open all day waiting for people to jump in for questions, and it’s sometimes spinning up my CPU fan, just doing nothing. If I could just sit there with my SIP client instead, it would be much more lightweight, and I could still attend.
This could also allow for some cool features like piping music on hold, which I’m currently doing with Pipewire hacks. 