Videoconferencing may be the next big thing, but unless you have a network in place to support it, then video conferencing could be the next big hassle. Audio and video quality depend upon bandwidth, which is defined as the data transfer rate of your Internet connection and is defined in bits per second such as kilo (kBPS), mega (mBPS) and giga (gBPS). Bandwidth considerations should be taken into account when choosing your videoconferencing service. Learning how to deal with low bandwidth issues and choose best app for your videoconferencing provider will ensure your time and money are not wasted.
Promises, Promises
In the eagerness to implement a video conferencing program, it’s easy to be led astray by companies marketing themselves as a low bandwidth solution that can nonetheless deliver high quality. It depends upon your definition of low bandwidth, but anyone who promises a video conference call with just 64 kB per second should be treated much the same as the email promising to share the wealth of unspecified developing world political figures, if you will simply provide your bank account information. At the rate of 64 kB per second you would be lucky to get some very glitchy and jittery video and there will be nothing remotely professional about the quality. 128 kB per second is the absolute minimum to get any decent video quality at all. Decent quality would be about 15 frames per second, which can be done it 128 kB per second. Depending on your network you might be able to wring 30 frames from a bandwidth of 256 kB per second. University of Virginia cites a frame rate of 24 frames per second for motion pictures and notes that most videoconferencing systems use a compression ratio of 10 to 1, meaning the image is slightly degraded over an ISDN line.
Meeting Jitters
TechRepublic notes that the growth of videoconferencing has an origin in the 2008 financial crisis, which impacted travel budgets even for the most cash-flush companies. However concerns about video quality, bandwidth usage, deployment can hang up even the most promising videoconferencing system. The quality of the wide area network (WAN) is a key factor in implementation. Some terms that organizations will need to understand are:
- Packet loss: Packet loss results in blocking us in jerkiness of video reception, as well as audio dropouts that can lead to disruption of the meeting flow with, “Sorry, I didn’t get that. Could you say that again?”
- Jitter: Anyone who has ever used YouTube or any other video application understands jitter. Jitter is essentially a backup at a stoplight on the Internet – a traffic delay resulting from variation in packet delivery. While data can be buffered, everyone remembers sitting and watching the screen while that little spinning icon went on forever.
- Latency: Think of latency as a bad dub. While you can see the person who is speaking, the movement of the lips does not match the delivery of the words. This can lead to awkwardness in the videoconference interactions.
Decreasing all three of these factors should be a goal in deploying any videoconferencing system.
Thinking Outside the Meeting Room
Whether your organization is thinking about implementing videoconferencing for the first time, or rethinking the use of an existing system, looking into the newer cloud-based technologies such as Blue Jeans offered for videoconferencing could save time, money, and hassle. As the technology for videoconferencing has matured and the use of video chat has broadened in the past 10 years, more people are familiar with the concept of meetings occurring outside the context provided by meeting room. With the advent of inexpensive broadband, and mobile broadband, videoconferencing can now reach places not previously considered such as places as remote as an oil platform far out at sea, or even your local Starbucks. For instance, the University of Georgia maintains a 1 GB per second uplink for each building, though it is generally recognized that traffic rarely exceeds 70 MB per second. While the bandwidth available to consumers and smaller businesses is much smaller, individuals and businesses generally have much smaller requirements in the first place.
Going Mobile
Getting your thinking outside the meeting room means considering where your personnel are on any given day. By implementing a lighter and more flexible meeting system, your personnel can attend a meeting from their desktop, laptop, tablet, or even their smart phone wherever they happen to be. Cloud-based applications such as Blue Jeans Video Collaboration for videoconferencing enable people to work with existing bandwidth or even over mobile broadband such as 3G or 4G from a variety of different devices. As lighter, flexible, and scalable systems become available companies and institutions should take full advantage of the new abilities that such systems have to offer.