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Allinilla's avatar
Allinilla
Copper Contributor
Mar 19, 2020
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Bandwidth and processing power in video meetings with a large number of participants

I am having difficulty understanding the bandwidth load in regards to video meetings in Teams.   I have read the content on this site : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/upgrade-prepa...
  • LinusCansby's avatar
    Mar 19, 2020

    Hi,

     

    If you a meeting with two persons, you and someone else, there will be two video streams from your computers. One inbound (up to 1.2 Mbps) and one outbound (up to 1.2 Mbps). Teams will adjust the quality based on available bandwidth.

     

    If you then invite 3 more attendees to that meeting (all uses video) the inbound bandwidth usage will not increase with 3 x 1.2 Mbps since the size of each video is smaller. You will probably see about the same bandwidth usage or slightly more (up to 2 Mbps for each computer). You will also see a smaller outbound bandwidth since your client don't have to send a stream with so high resolution as before.

     

    Then when you are a total of 5 attendees in the meeting you invite 5 more users, the bandwidth usage will stay about the same since it you will only see 4 videos at the same time. If all 10 of you are inside the same network there might be 10 inbound video streams thru your firewall if you don't have 4 active speakers in the meeting.

     

    If you don't say anything in the meeting and your video is not shown for any of the other participants your computer will not send any outbound video stream. If someone pin your video stream your client will send video again.

     

    If someone start to share their screen the video resolution is even smaller so then you will see a decrease on the bandwidth usage.

     

     

     

    If you are going to host a live seminar with 60 viewers and there is only one or a few presenters I would suggest that you use Live Events. It is created in Teams but the viewers will get a video stream instead of attending a meeting. Viewers can ask question via chat but they can't ask questions using voice.

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