Video Conferencing

Author
Discussion

darrent

Original Poster:

630 posts

260 months

Monday 21st February 2005
quotequote all
Does anybody know of a company that does good reliable video conferencing via broadband. We have several part time sales people (all in UK) who we would like to “meet” with each Monday without the hassle of actually jumping in the car as they literally live at the four corners of the UK!!!!

In an ideal world we would like to just log into a web page, each person enter a user name and away we go….

Plotloss

67,280 posts

271 months

Monday 21st February 2005
quotequote all
If they all have broadband netmeeting via a webcam is the most cost effective solution.

If its a money no object affair then I think PictureTel are the leaders...

Nacnud

2,190 posts

270 months

Monday 21st February 2005
quotequote all
5 of us voice conference every day from four different locations and it has been a real pain to find a good solution.

Instant Messenger - one-to-one only

Skype - Massive bandwidth usage and won't do more than four people. Works around the firewall and VPN connection issues though... However, I did get fed up with people I didn't know trying to ring me!

PicoPhone - real issues getting everybody hooked up as visibility across routers and firewalls is a major issue. Only solution is the Pico name server wich we found unreliable. Occasional problems with people being disconnected. However, we used this pretty happily for about a year!

TeamSpeak - Really good!
Have to run a server on a machine with a known address, but this solves most of the big security/firewall problems in one easy go. It's come out of the online gaming world and allows chat rooms to be set up and meetings can be split easily into working groups. Well worth a try and the license is peanuts.
www.goteamspeak.com/

If someone suggests a good videoconferencing solution for at least four locations at the same time we would love to look at it

chrisjl

785 posts

283 months

Tuesday 22nd February 2005
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Nacnud said:
Skype - Massive bandwidth usage and won't do more than four people. Works around the firewall and VPN connection issues though... However, I did get fed up with people I didn't know trying to ring me!


There's an option to switch that off. And I thought it scaled all the way down to dial-up speeds?

Nacnud

2,190 posts

270 months

Tuesday 22nd February 2005
quotequote all
My broadband could take the strain even without degrading the voice quality. The office was a different matter as peaks in their load broke up the conference.

I don't understand why, but PicoPhone and TeamSpeak are much more bandwidth friendly when conferencing. When we tried Skype and we all thought 'strewth!'

However, it was the low limit on the maximum number of users in a conference that scuppered Skype for us - we routinely have more people talking than their maximum.