When the pandemic hit I thought about putting out some pointers to easier to use low latency streaming resources... but... that would require overcoming pandemic lockdown funk. And honestly it's still kind of a technical rats nest to get everything working. It's not exactly musician friendly to need instructions like "next you need to make sure your nic doesn't enable interrupt mitigation when there are more than 100 packets per second...". :)
[I love Jack BTW.]
One of the 2 netjack implementations uses Opus - great stuff.
Absolutely right that the good stuff (i.e. not zoom) requires way too much setup, and even then (as you note) you're not guaranteed reliable function because you don't control all the hops. Soundjack gets the user-side fairly good, but it's still not quite what I think would have really taken off during the pandemic - probably needs a mobile app for that.
And hey Paul, long time no chat!
In case you're not aware, I'm the original author of JACK, around which JackTrip is built, which is the most likely and reliable tool for such a collaboration. I certainly know people who've done this, and I regret that I didn't realize back in February how useful it would have been to make something like JackTrip into a much easier-to-use tool for computer-naive folks.
37ms cross-country in the USA is optimistic, but certainly possible. US->Europe is not so great.