Thoughts about TURN commercial services

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Gustavo Garcia

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Jun 10, 2025, 4:56:03 AMJun 10

to TURN Server (Open-Source project)

Hi folks,

While reading this guide on launching WebRTC services from BlogGeek, I noticed it recommends using a third-party commercial TURN service. While that may feel a bit disappointing, it's probably a practical choice for many who just want to launch their product without getting bogged down in infrastructure details.

That got me thinking—what are these commercial TURN providers actually using? I did a bit of digging and here’s what I found:

Twilio NAT Traversal: Clearly based on coturn. It's not even hidden—you can see it in the STUN responses via the SOFTWARE tag.
Cloudflare TURN: Appears not to use coturn. Error messages and nonce sizes differ from typical coturn behavior.

Based on this, here are a couple of action items I'd like to explore in the coming months:

Improve our documentation so fewer developers feel forced to rely on third-party TURN services.
Learn from what others are doing. For example, I just noticed that Cloudflare doesn’t send a response phrase in certain cases—a good mitigation against amplification attacks we’ve discussed on the issue tracker.

Curious to hear your thoughts:
What are other providers doing? Any best practices we should adopt? Feedback is welcome!

And if you're working on WebRTC products, that free guide from BlogGeek is worth a look—some solid insights in there.

Best regards,

Jean Pluzo

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Jun 12, 2025, 3:05:13 AMJun 12

to TURN Server (Open-Source project)

Hola Gustavo,

thanks for your investigation!

We've been using our own stun/turn servers since the pandemic started. For me personally it was kind of hard to understad not only the protocoll(s) involved, but the whole setup and how to configure coturn. Once you get the hang of it is becomes a much simplier task.

It would be great if the docuementation could improve (I would gladly chip in), since this is what drives most (new) users or administrators away.

My wild guess is that this google group was made to share information regarding coturn, but it has been somewhat stale. If people notice that there's recent activity in the group, perhaps they would also start to post.