Google Meet Now Enforces Group Call Length Limit For Free Gmail Users

In light of COVID-19 driving all communication online, free Google Meet users with personal Gmail accounts could take advantage of group calls without a duration limit over the past year. That benefit ended at the start of this month and Google has detailed the new limitation. 9to5Google reports: When Meet became available for all users in April of 2020, Google said it wouldn't enforce a 60-minute time limit on calls until September 30. That deadline for group calls that could run all day long was later extended to March 31, 2021, and again to June 30. Google did not bump it again before July, and free Gmail users now have to live with one key group Meet limit. "Calls with 3 or more participants" are limited to 60 minutes.

"Tip: At 55 minutes, everyone gets a notification that the call is about to end," says Google. "To extend the call, the host can upgrade their Google account. Otherwise, the call will end at 60 minutes." That said, one-on-one calls can continue to run for up to 24 hours on free and enterprise accounts. The upgrade mentioned by Google is the $9.99 per month Workspace Individual tier that just launched in five countries. If the hosts upgrade, calls can run for up to a day.

Jitsi

[dskoll]

Jitsi continues to be free. And you can self-host if you have the server and the know-how.

^-- This, times 1 million.

[DrYak]

Jitsi continues to be free. And you can self-host if you have the server and the know-how.

No mod points today, but yes, I totally agree:
- rely on somebody's proprietary tech and you can get locked in pretty fast.
- rely purely on open standards and open-source code and you're free to move your stuff wherever you want.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Open source is the important part if you want to be assured that you are appropriately empowered.

Open Source can still have roadblocks in the way of utilization, like Tivoization or patents. If you want rights, you want Free Software.

Re:

[rtb61]

Rely on somebody's else's infrastructure and learn to read the fine print. "All data in Meet is encrypted in transit by default between the client and Google" https://support.google.com/a/a... [google.com]. Hey wait a minute their partner, I want it encrypted by default between client and client, why the hell is security ending at Google. They can listen in first and data mine. What drugs are you people on.

You encryption is a joke if it from you to someone else's corporate server. It should all be encrypted from client

Re: Jitsi

[TuballoyThunder]

Jitsi is very useful. No mod points to give.

Re:

[IdanceNmyCar]

Jitsi is so stupid simple to use. They did it perfectly. I live in China and have a father who is getting quite older. Anything that requires registration and setup can really give him a hassle. He has been able to use Jitsi from multiple devices.

Re:

[jellomizer]

So it is free except for spending a few thousand dollars on a server, That will probably will need an average of 1 hour of maintenance a week, so labor cost/opportunity cost is about $50 every week.

Free is sometimes expensive.

Re:

[mark-t]

I can't tell if you are trying to ironic or if you genuinely don't realize that most people's desktops are more than able to function as a server for such things, and that no additional costs are necessary when someone who is hosting the server is part of that conversation anyways.

Re:

[jellomizer]

I can't tell if you are trying to be ironic or if you genuinely think that having a Desktop running a server application is an appropriate and safe method to run a business critical process.

Does your business have Excel or Access as its key database, where you gladly think it works fine, and forgetting that twice a month you will need to restore from a backup copy, or that time once a year, your boss is in pure panic, because all the business information is lost?

Sure I have the power on my current laptop to

Re:

[Junta]

If you are of the sort that you have no server resource available whatsoever, then the desktop/laptop use case may be relevant.

If you have a business with business critical needs, surely you have some on-premise or off-premise place with some capacity to run a jitsi instance.

If you are 1000% sure that you cannot and must not ever run a jitsi instance yourself, then just go to https://meet.jit.si/ [meet.jit.si] for your zoom/teams/webex like way of using it.

So Jitsi is set up to be used like any other video meeting platfo

Re:

[mark-t]

I was referring to conference calls, not business critical processes in general.

When you want to criticize something, it's a good idea to criticize what they were actually talking about instead of making up something else that might happen to fall into some similar category that you can identify and criticizing that.

I believe the technical term for what you've done here is a "strawman".

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[nadaou]

The https://meet.jit.si/ [meet.jit.si] backend is not CPU, memory, or hard drive intensive. If it was the meet.jit.si site couldn't exist, it's an open source project after all with some but not ubercorp level sponsorship. If you plan on operating your own relay server on a very large scale it will use a lot of bandwidth though, so maybe put it on your email server but not your file server.

Re:

[cmseagle]

Who's going out and buying a server to run Jitsi on bare metal? Pay like $10/month for a virtual private server or instance on your cloud provider of choice and host it there.

Agreed on the opportunity cost of the time spent maintaining it, though.

Re: Jitsi

[TuballoyThunder]

Jitsi easily runs on a m2 EC2 instance. Don't know where you get the thousands of dollars per year metric.

Re: Jitsi

[dskoll]

A few thousand dollars for a serve? Are you mad? My Jitsi installation runs on a virtual private server from Luna Node that costs me $3.50 per month. I probably spend less than an hour a month administering the server.

Feature?

[AmiMoJo]

1 hour limit seems like a feature. I never schedule longer meetings because if you need more time it just means you really need to do more prep.

Yeah that's why I don't login to Webex

[raymorris]

That's precisely what I was thinking. I don't log in to WebEx and therefore have a time limit on my meetings *on purpose*. After about 50 minutes its time to stop yip-yapping and make a decision on what to do next. Then be done with that topic for today.

Re:

[raymorris]

Ps - this may be the very first time that you and I ever agreed on anything. :)

We agree we don't want to spend more than an hour listening to each other's bullshit. Lol

How much more do I need to pay

[aberglas]

To have a 30 minute limit?

Seriously, I would like a feature that times how long each participant speaks for. Once it gets to a predetermined limit, they get slowly muted out.

Most people seem to love the sound of their own voice.

Re:

[belg4mit]

Nope. I've used Google Meets as a voice and video channel for virtual game nights, which generally exceed 60 minutes.

Hit some friends playing D&D

[drinkypoo]

Many people will probably go to Discord, which is still free, though its client sucks.

Re:

[antdude]

IRC 4 others & me, & 4ever.

Google giveth. Google Taketh

[RotateLeftByte]

Move along there. Nothing new to report.

Re:

[deKernel]

Says the guy who has produced nothing useful to the world and has just leeches off of society, but hey, you go with your idiotic rant.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Remember 'we will do no evil'?

No, and neither do you. It was "don't be evil", noob.

Re:

[swillden]

lol, the wording is irrelevant, it's the concept

If you think there is no semantic or conceptual difference between "do no evil" and "don't be evil", you fail at English. And logic.

More people will switch to Telegram.

[kot-begemot-uk]

At this rate, by end of year they will lose a lot of users to Telegram. Decent IM, proper clients instead of in-browser vomit and now voice and conference calls all the way to event size.

MathPump turns Inkscape into interactive whiteboar

[extraqwert]

MathPump [github.com] turns Inkscape [inkscape.org] into remote whiteboard. (But requires knowledge of Linux to setup the server.)

Ok

[cascadingstylesheet]

Temporary removal of limit to free product ends. And ... something?

Huh?

[Moochman]

I pay just 5.20 euros a month for Google Workspace Starter. Just checked and the price for the basic plan in the U.S. is just 6 Euros - and it even advertises being able to host up to 100 users in Meet, I'm fairly certain with no time limit. So what gives, why would anyone pay more for the "Individual" plan? Couldn't find any direct comparisons of "Business Startet" and "Individual" when I googled it. ðY(TM)