Overview

Before planning and setting up a web meeting youl should consider some factors, which might influence the quality of the meeting.

Bandwidth

The main technical factor influencing the quality of the web meeting is the available bandwidth of your Internet connection. If you are using only audio (over VoIP) there are no real restrictions regarding the bandwidth (about 25kHz needed). If you and your participants are using web cams you need to watch the available bandwidth. A web cam requires in the range of 100kb/s bandwwidth per participant with web cam, which means that you will need about 125kHz for a audio/video connection. If you have many participants in the meeting this quickly adds up to significant bandwidth requirements. As an alternative to web cams you sometime might put a picture of yourself as replacement for the live web cam in order to save bandwidth. 

You may want to check your Internet connection priot to the web meeting by running a connection check. This will give you an indication of the quality of your Internet connection and you may then deicde e.g. to run the meeting without web cams.

You can also use the possibility to de-activate one or more web cams as a participant to save your own bandwidth if your bandwidth shoud be insufficient. 

Audio

If you have participants sitting in different continents like USA, Japan or Australia you might experience some delay in the audio (latency) depending on the quality of the Internet connection.

If you are using a laptop for the web meeting it is recommended to use a headset to eliminate echoing. Some web meeting providers offers a feature called echo suppression, which allows you to control the echoing. 

Screen Sharing and Remote Control

Screen Sharing and Remote Control also requires extra bandwidth (>200kHz) and you might experience some delays when using these functions depending on the available bandwidth..