Hi Mike

I have some past professional experience of this and the hosted
systems, while expensive, overcome the biggest problem in VoIP, which
is latency - the gap between someone speaking and the others hearing.
Any appreciable latency makes two-way conversation impossible as two
or more people can begin speaking at the same time and it is several
seconds before they realise it. The normal process of backing off and
trying again (like TCP) is also affected so you end up with lots of
interrupted sentences.

The big providers help to overcome latency by having specialist
servers with the right configuration and enough 'grunt' and by having
dedicated lines with access points all over the world so that only the
local traffic to the participants is on the general internet.

Skype is great for small numbers, (say 5 or less) but is affected by
the participants' 'servers' and any general internet latency as
numbers grow. Having said that, it seems to get better and better.

With the big systems you have a choice between pure VoIP, which is
free for all, or a bridged telephone system, which reduces latency,
but for which someone has to pay the cost. If you put that on the
users, they will be billed for what are effectively premium rate
calls, and that can be as expensive when meetings go on for a couple
of hours. Also, I suspect that this is how many of the providers
'cream' their profits.

The other problem is the users. They tend to want 'always on' sound
and video, rather than handing round a virtual mic so that only one
person has the floor. 'Always on' only adds to the bandwidth required,
increasing latency, and also adds to the background noise as any
participant in a noisy environment will spoil the sound for the
others. This is also why voice-activated tends not to work - the mic
sits in the off state until someone coughs or a fire alarm goes off,
then it switches on and pumps that noise into the meeting.

Users will also join meetings with built-in microphones that tend to
be poor quality and omnidirectional, so pick up background noise
rather than speech. They then proceed to answer their emails during
meetings, which involves bashing on the keyboard that is right next to
the mic, deafening the other participants.  The answer is to wear
headsets, but this is not popular - the expression 'herding cats'
comes to mind.

I've even had participants try to join across a public Wi-Fi (against
all advice) from  moving train, where the packet loss is most of the
traffic. Needless to say it did not work, but people have such
endearing faith in technology and don't seem to appreciate that they
are crashing a meeting that has work to achieve (we had fortnightly
meetings of admins).

I'm a big fan of webconferencing, but it has to be done right to work,
and that involves some discipline among the users, which I know, from
bitter experience, is an uphill struggle.

Maybe , though the MCG users are techno-savvy and well disciplined....

Anyway, I'm happy to share what knowledge I have, though some of it is
a few years out of date.


Regards

Neil Rathbone
[log in to unmask]

>
> Date:    Fri, 17 Apr 2015 11:38:19 +0100
> From:    Mike Ellis <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Pooled video-conferencing
>
> Hi all
>
> I've just been looking into pricing of video conferencing for a client.
> Lots of options out there, the most attractive of which is probably Big
> Blue Button because it's O/S and looks feature rich.
>
> The downside is that hosting probably requires a VPS or similar, so
> likely cost of ~£500 p/a.
>
> So the questions are:
>
> 1) Is there an alternative, a good one? I've looked at
>
> - Hangouts (great in theory, flaky in practice)
> - Blue Jeans (absolutely brilliant - used for first time yesterday, but
> haven't been able to get any answers about pricing - suspect it's expensive)
> - Adobe Connect (good but expensive)
> - WebEx (download is big, clunky. expensive)
> - appear.in (lovely, simple, free, probably not enough features)
>
> ..then the obvious ones like GoToMeeting, Skype, etc etc
>
> 2) Is there any merit (could we ever be organised / agree enough) in
> having some kind of shared resource that the museum community could share?
>
> Madness.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Mike
>
>
>
>
>
> _____________________________
>
>
> *Mike Ellis *
>
> Thirty8 Digital: a small but perfectly formed digital
> agency:http://thirty8.co.uk <http://thirty8.co.uk/>
>
> * My book: http://heritageweb.co.uk <http://heritageweb.co.uk/> *
>
>
> ****************************************************************
>        website:  http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/
>        Twitter:  http://www.twitter.com/ukmcg
>       Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/museumscomputergroup
>  [un]subscribe:  http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/email-list/
> ****************************************************************
>

****************************************************************
       website:  http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/
       Twitter:  http://www.twitter.com/ukmcg
      Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/museumscomputergroup
 [un]subscribe:  http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/email-list/
****************************************************************