I wonder where the closest Zoom PoP is to you? I've had the opposite experience, Zoom worked on connections where Hangouts was terrible.

If two participants are in EU, the latency is awful. I don't get the impression they have multiple POPs.

I'm based in the EU (until Brexit anyway) and often do calls with mainland Europe. Never had that problem. Seen a high CPU warning a couple of times but it goes away. Overall I'm a fan. I have friends who use it for virtual conferences even.

Do you have people using the POTS gateways?

I use the free version out of the box to onboard new people (mostly independent coaches/consultants from around the world) as partners - see https://www.agendashift.com/partners to get a feel of geographic coverage

We use uberconference (nothing to do with Uber!) in North America and Europe (multiple countries) and it works like a charm.

I guess like every option mentioned here they all suck for someone. We have used Uberconference and the audio quality is terrible. And it's not uniformly terrible either which is even more frustrating. Some of the attendees won't be able to understand some people and other attendees everything sounds fine (although it always sounds like a poor quality cellphone conversation).

With Google Hangouts we have poor quality audio as well and at least once per day we have someone that their audio won't come thorough unless they restart their Mac.

I'm secretary for an org. We're trying to use uberconference for our executive board meetings. I like that remotes can call into conference bridge via phone.

I bought a SABRA bluetooth thingie for the room. Seems to work well.

Our results are mixed. We test out the conf room before the meeting starts. Good to go. Then weird stuff happens. People being muted. Their icon shows them talking, but no sound. People being dropped.

I don't mind the unreliability so much. 7 laws of networking and so forth.

I frikkin hate that I don't know what's broken, so can't hope to fix it. Especially DURING the frikkin meeting.

I've used Uberconference (pro) over fiber for a couple of years, and it's been rock solid. In cases where one caller is bad, the web interface will show you who is killing the call quality and lets you mute them.

Except in rare cases, I find the problems you're describing are usually a problem with the end-user, their equipment, or their network. Cheap phones, bad cell connection, bad voip, etc. An unmuted speakerphone with a noisy background can bring most calls to their knees.

We too have used Uberconference, I forget why we ditched that as well, might have been down to the cost of the thing. I actually quite liked it, the web application was solid and it encourages ad-hoc meetings.