[liberationtech] What are the best-in-class video conferencing options for low-bandwidth situations?

[Jeff Gima]

We organize relatively frequent meetings and webinars for colleagues across
our consortium (with academic institutions across several regions including
Africa and the Middle East <https://www.amicalnet.org/members>). We
typically have people connecting from 5 or 10 different countries, often
with very different levels of internet connection quality/bandwidth. After
testing many options (Skype, Hangouts, Fuze, Adobe Connect, AppearIn and
others I can't remember) we settled on Zoom for both meetings and
webinar-type events. We found meeting connections to be more consistently
stable and usable (even if in some cases necessary to cut video and use
audio only). Our member institutions may have better internet connections
on average compared to local individuals and organizations, though, so
perhaps there are other solutions that degrade more gracefully in extremely
low/unstable bandwidth environments.

Jeff

--
*Jeff Hiroshi Gima * |  Director, AMICAL Consortium <http://amicalnet.org/>
|  American University of Paris <http://www.aup.edu/>
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<https://twitter.com/jeffhgima>
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On Thu, 20 Feb 2020 at 08:06, Nick Hurlburt <nickhurlburt at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm trying to help some people across parts of Africa and the Middle East
> with communication options, many of whom are in areas with poor internet
> infrastructure.  Video conferencing is rather painful using the standards
> (Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts).  I'm wondering if those are the best
> available, or if there is anything that is more specifically designed for
> those kinds of situations that might work better, or even just degrade more
> gracefully?
>
> Thanks,
> Nick
>
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