Forum Discussion
Hosting skype meetings on small DSL lines
Hi
We are trying to get our users to move from hosting meetings in WebEx and start hosting them in Skype FB instead.
But often it seems that if a user is sitting on a smaller DSL line (e.g. 13/1 mbit), a WebEx presentation will run fine but running the presentation in Skype FB will not work very well.
I have asked MS skype team about this but can not get a straight answer about, what the recomendation is to a DSL line size.
My example is that my users has a 13/1 mbit DSL line and hosts a presentation with 6 participents. The participents is a mix of internal users and external users. My user experience that the presentation is ended with errors: "network issues", "Error during screen presentation", "Can not connect to presentation server".
There is a lot of varibels here, but my first guess is, that a 1 mbit upload will be the first problem. But can anyone comment on this, with their experience on mbit size or other factores?
Hi Jesper,
one important concept to understand when it comes to meetings is, how the call flows look like:
- Meetings are alwazs hosted on O365 (for Skype for Business Online) respectively on your Conferencing Server (if you have SKype for Business Server on premises)
- Each participant has a basically a direct media connection to the service/server
- On the service/server all media is mixed and send out to all participants
- This means that no matter how many users you have or if these users are internal or external, since all communication is just between the individual user and service/server
- Only when it comes to video, the number of attendees will affect the bandwidth: Skype for Business is able to display up to five video streams plus a panorama video, so you would require more bandwidth for video in a meeting with 5 users, than in a meeting with 3 videos (well, actually it is more complicated as it also depends on the size of the video window)
If you need more information on network planning, I recommend to look at the Skype Operationsframework network readiness section: https://www.skypeoperationsframework.com/Offers/?pageState=NetworkReadiness
hth,
thomas
5 Replies
Just like mentioned earlier, all users "consume" media directly from Microsoft so if you have multiple users sharing the 13/1 DSL you will not get a very good meeting.
If you are hosting a meeting (presenting) from a 13/1 DSL, using both audio, video and desktop sharing, your 1 Mbps upload will not be enough.
Your audio stream will consume some 80 kbps, the video stream everything from 500 kbps to 2 Mbps depending on camera and cpu. Additionally the presentation (shared desktop) is also using video based stream, also possible to consume quite a lot bandwidth. So all this together will not be a good platform for doing meetings, you need more bandwidth on the upload-part of your DSL.
Surely Skype for Business can switch to less bandwidth-consuming codecs, and does a very good job at without the users noticing anything execpt lower quiality video resolution and framrate. But my beleive is that in this case changing codecs won't be enough.
Presentations without video, and using shared application in stead of shared desktop might work better. If presenting Powerpoints, make sure you use the "Share Powerpoint files" in stead of sharing the actual application. This reduces the required bandwith a lot since the Powerpoint file gets uploaded and converted to images using no up or download at all when viewing the presentation.
Mikael Bohlin is correct that you probably don't want to ahve multiple users joining via the same small pipe to the same meeting as everyone will receive and send their own stream (which is exactly the same as other meeting solutions) -- so it makes sense for these users to sit together in a conference room.
hth,
thomas
Hi Jesper,
one important concept to understand when it comes to meetings is, how the call flows look like:
- Meetings are alwazs hosted on O365 (for Skype for Business Online) respectively on your Conferencing Server (if you have SKype for Business Server on premises)
- Each participant has a basically a direct media connection to the service/server
- On the service/server all media is mixed and send out to all participants
- This means that no matter how many users you have or if these users are internal or external, since all communication is just between the individual user and service/server
- Only when it comes to video, the number of attendees will affect the bandwidth: Skype for Business is able to display up to five video streams plus a panorama video, so you would require more bandwidth for video in a meeting with 5 users, than in a meeting with 3 videos (well, actually it is more complicated as it also depends on the size of the video window)
If you need more information on network planning, I recommend to look at the Skype Operationsframework network readiness section: https://www.skypeoperationsframework.com/Offers/?pageState=NetworkReadiness
hth,
thomas
Ali AlamMicrosoft
Have you done any network bandwidth measurement to see what is the effective bandwidth at the time? There are many FREE online bandwidth meter to do this.
Also - you can reference this document on bandwidth need for different modality https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj688118(v=ocs.15).aspx
- nomorephones
My home circuit is roughly this configuration - I think throughput I get down to the workstation is less than what the wireline speed of my upload is but this is definitely in the same ballpark. I both host and attend meetings in my home office and don't have the same experience. While there are definitely cases where I can top out on my bandwidth and the experience starts to degrade (splitting out incoming video on a separate monitor & going fullscreen, etc.) I haven't found basic functionality to be compromised.
Except....when I connect to the wrong AP. I have two radios with different SSIDs and one afternoon was having horrible SFB problems. Took me way to long to discover that I was actually hooked up to the radio at the far end of the house, not the one a floor above me.
The reason I bring this up is that yes while the raw bitspeed of the circuit is a factor, there are many more. The inside wire, any RF that's going on, the workstation being used and the devices connected to it all can be a part of a poor media experience.
WIth every call and conference join the client reports back quality information that can be used to debug this further. Have you looked into the Call Quality Dashboard at all? If you're online, details are here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Turning-on-and-using-Call-Quality-Dashboard-in-Skype-for-Business-Online-553fa13c-92d2-4d5c-a3d5-41a073cb047c?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US
