For the Linux Users of Victoria (LUV) I’ve run video conferences on Jitsi and BBB (see my previous post about BBB vs Jitsi [1]). One issue with video conferences is the bandwidth requirements.
The place I’m hosting my video conference server has a NBN link with allegedly 40Mb/s transmission speed and 100Mb/s reception speed. My tests show that it can transmit at about 37Mb/s and receive at speeds significantly higher than that but also quite a bit lower than 100Mb/s (around 60 or 70Mb/s). For a video conference server you have a small number of sources of video and audio and a larger number of targets as usually most people will have their microphones muted and video cameras turned off. This means that the transmission speed is the bottleneck. In every test the reception speed was well below half the transmission speed, so the tests confirmed my expectation that transmission was the only bottleneck, but the reception speed was higher than I had expected.
When we tested bandwidth use the maximum upload speed we saw was about 4MB/s (32Mb/s) with 8+ video cameras and maybe 20 people seeing some of the video (with a bit of lag). We used 3.5MB/s (28Mb/s) when we only had 6 cameras which seemed to be the maximum for good performance.
In another test run we had 4 people all sending video and the transmission speed was about 260KB/s.
I don’t know how BBB manages the small versions of video streams. It might reduce the bandwidth when the display window is smaller.
I don’t know the resolutions of the cameras. When you start sending video in BBB you are prompted for the “quality” with “medium” being default. I don’t know how different camera hardware and different choices about “quality” affect bandwidth.
These tests showed that for the cameras we had available a small group of people video chatting a 100/40 NBN link (the fastest Internet link in Australia that’s not really expensive) a small group of people can be all sending video or a medium size group of people can watch video streams from a small group.
For meetings of the typical size of LUV meetings we won’t have a bandwidth problem.
There is one common case that I haven’t yet tested, where there is a single video stream that many people are watching. If 4 people are all sending video with 260KB/s transmission bandwidth then 1 person could probably send video to 4 for 65KB/s. Doing some simple calculations on those numbers implies that we could have 1 person sending video to 240 people without running out of bandwidth. I really doubt that would work, but further testing is needed.