how to login facetime if no other device

This XMPP connection relies on a client certificate on the device issued by Apple.

RTP relies on something else to establish a session and in Apple's case it appears to rely on XMPP.

RTP, or real-time transport protocol was designed to facilitate video and audio communications over the internet with low latency. These are ports associated with audio and video RTP, which makes sense.

These ports might be familiar to those of you who have worked with firewalls.

UDP traffic between the iOS device and Apple servers on ports 1636.

Interestingly, it is ALSO used for XMPP connections, which will come up later.

We know that 5223 is used by a lot of things, but for Apple its used for their push notification services.

A TCP connection over port 5223 is established with an Apple server.

Here were the steps to a FaceTime call around 2010: For those who have worked in VoIP technologies in their career, it's going to look pretty similar to what you may have seen before (with some Apple twists). During this period there was a lot of good packet capture work done by interested parties and we got a sense for how the protocol functioned. What do we know about FaceTime?Ī lot of our best information for how FaceTime worked (past tense is important here) is from interested parties around the time the feature was announced, so around the 2010 timeframe. All of this needs to run on a device with a very impressive CPU but limited battery capacity. This connection needs to be secure, reliable enough to maintain a conversation and also low bandwidth enough to be feasible given modern cellular data limits and home internet data caps.

We need to establish a connection between two devices through various levels of networking abstraction, both at the ISP level and home level. So how does Apple do this? As someone who has worked as a systems administrator for their entire career, the technical challenges are kind of immense when you think about them. So when my mom and I chat over FaceTime Audio and the quality is so good it is like she is in the room with me, it really stands out compared to my many other phone calls in the course of a week. When we all switched to cell service audio quality took a huge hit and with modern VoIP home phones the problem hasn't gotten better. For those of you old enough to remember landlines, it reminds me of those but if you had a good headset. Not only is it simple to use and reliable, but the sound quality is incredible. As an ex-pat living in Denmark, I use FaceTime audio a lot.

How to login facetime if no other device