Expanded testing of video conferencing bandwidth usage over 50/5 Mbps broadband
cablelabs.com
cablelabs.com
It’s unsurprising that the uplink caps at 5mpbs, it’s a 50/5 connection; but the article just wants the reader to “take their word” that the video stream look good without also comparing other connections (the apps themselves might self regulate) or latency (the apps might employ more buffering on a slow connection)
The South Park nipple rubbing cable tv operators but in real life.
Cable is a perfectly viable technology, with DOCSIS 3.1 and 4, for at least another decade, probably more. Their own lack of infrastructure investment is coming to bite them in the ass, fast.
For clarification: I work for an ISP/telco that manages legacy copper POTS/xDSL, cable, fiber and cellular networks. While we are actively expanding fiber from the backbone out and doing a lot of FTTH by now, cable is still a solid workhorse, but it takes an operator who actually cares about maintaining the infrastructure.
With a competently designed network, you wouldn't have anywhere near that many in a segment.
I'm on a 300/60 cable connection via my employer, and I have never had my connection test below 360/70. This is in an an area densely populated with apartment buildings, where cable is still the best option for most people, with some fiber rolling out.
I am however moving to a 100/100 fiber connection (plenty fast for my needs, with the faster upload speed), due to a change in employment that is not of my own choice. So I don't consider myself biased in favor of my current employer ;-)
Cable is alive and well, if properly maintained and upgraded.
Ten years back I was told America likes to zap quickly through tv-channels with all the artefacts involved while Asia preferred a slower and artefact-free experience. Analog and keyframeless digital codecs are faster but not so bandwidth efficient.
So saying a "mix of laptops" and "nothing special" isn't actually that helpful. Having ten laptops uploading their potato quality video over wired Ethernet without issues is a completely unsurprising result.
A 5mbps upstream connection is much less useful for those that have better quality cameras available. Most phones and tablets have much better front cameras than laptops and desktops. Even the iPad mini can do 1080p video on its front camera. A year into the pandemic and good webcams are still sold out so there's a non-zero population with 1080p webcams they're using for conferencing. A 5mbps upstream is a joke for people doing Twitch et al live streams.
Sorry cable internet providers, your terrible service for obnoxious prices is not a good value. A 5mbps upstream connection is absurdly low in general, let alone in a world where people are spending hours a day video conferencing.
Up until late last year, my parents' connection was an ADSL that could only do 4-5 Mbps download. I could watch 1080p videos on Amazon Prime without any issue, and the quality was much, much above what I can possibly expect a good webcam to provide. Hell, I remember watching Star Trek in 480p on a MacBook Pro Retina in bed and being impressed by how good the image quality was.
I understand that real-time compression isn't as good, that movies have better cameras, lighting, etc.
But that's the thing, though. Maybe instead of pushing a ton of random garbage pixels per frame, a lower resolution will be just as good.
Instead of pushing for a 4K 60 fps or more webcam, let's make a damn good 720p one. Maybe add some diffuse light to it, like the Razer Kiyo. It will probably improve the perceived quality much, much more than an ultra high def one fighting with backlight and other suboptimal environment issues.
Most laptops have terrible cameras. Their best output can be encoded at a few hundred Kbps and would be neigh indistinguishable from video captured by the same camera directly to disk. A good 720p or 1080p camera needs quite a bit more bandwidth to maintain good visual quality. If upstream bandwidth is constrained the software will dial back the visual quality to potato levels. For anyone that needs non-potato quality this is problematic.
Cable Internet companies patting themselves on the back for handling a dozen potato streams is just sad. Not everyone is ok with such quality. In an online classroom setting, the students don't necessarily need great quality upstream video but the instructor trying to capture a white board or switch between live video and a detailed presentation does want that high quality upstream video.
Video quality from streaming services is immaterial here. There's a lot of quality/bitrate tweaks that can be done with offline encoding that are not workable for real-time encoding.
My dad considers the computer he bought in 2005 “good enough” but most people who are tech literate and who live on technology would consider that to be painfully ridiculous.
My work laptop has forced software updates, so at the start of lockdown, to protect my home internet connection I hard capped it to 4Mbps in both directions at the switch. I’ve been having ~back-to-back Meet video calls all day for an entire year without exceeding this or having any problems.
I think the quality of the connection (consistency, upstream contention, jitter, packet loss) is probably far more important for most practical business applications (ie excluding HD Netflix, game downloads etc).
Your 50/5 broadband isn't dedicated to you, instead you share a single up link connection.
Depending on where you live and how they've extended it, you could have terrible ratios like 1:20.
This is often where you get the issues with connection consistency.
However consumers have no way of seeing what their ratio is.
So I'd argue getting higher bandwidth connections to households means that this would give a reason for ISPs to upgrade their infrastructure.
Also as consumers we should demand more not less from service providers.
50/5 is terrible. 625 kilobytes a second upload, that's objectively horrible internet.
If you're sharing a home with other people, you need to say to them "I'm going to have a conference call, could you not use the internet"
That is ridiculous. Video conference calls can have higher quality streams as well.
But also there are plenty of industries where they aren't just pushing text to the internet.
What about creative fields where they want to upload a multi megapixel image they're going to get printed on a billboard?
Or a game developer who wants to iterate on assets?
High quality remote desktop streaming to a high end PC in a data centre?
There's a lot of business applications which aren't just email and code which would benefit from a good internet connection.
Where one person will have to wait seconds for an upload, and someone else has to wait minutes or hours.
Like I have a 1000/1000 connection in the UK, that has a low contention where I get great consistency of connection. And it costs me the equivalent of $70 a month.
It enables so much in an internet connected world. And I think as consumers we should be demanding that.
Not arguing that a connection that'd be impressive in 2005, is acceptable.
There’s plenty of use cases for higher upload bandwidth, some of which you mentioned, but VCs on current generation laptops isn’t one of them.
A bigger issue is over reliance on WiFi in dense neighborhoods or through multiple walls. A better or more widely deployed in-unit wired network technology would be more impactful for a lot of people. I wish cat6 Ethernet was standard in construction, but in the US at least it seems to not be still. Our building was renovated in 2009 and has plenty of coaxial connections: 3 in the living room and 1 per bedroom, but no Ethernet. I’ve been slowly adding Ethernet to the coax plates, but it’s a real pain in the tail to do in an already built building.
Is there any examples of the quality of the video? If someone's face is a handful of pixels and them presenting their screen is a blur or super laggy, is that good enough?
What happens if one person makes a Google Duo call? That's in HD.
Or if one person turns on their console and starts uploading a save file to the cloud?
5mbps is horrendous.
It's really annoying that with all participants on symmetric gigabit connections we can't have 1080@30fps or 2160@30fps on any major video platform.
This is definitely a "5mbps ought to be enough for anyone!" puff piece (as another commenter pointed out).
Doesn't make sense for those companies to pay money to increase resolution and framerate when most of their customers are on shitty wifi with shitty cameras and wouldn't notice a quality increase anyway.
Thus we proceed with 15-year-old quality levels.
Biggest issue with video over networking would be bit errors as those micro delays of retransmission of if just sending without error checking, you will notice the impact. Audio a single bit error and you won't notice, networking you won't notice as all transparent or insignificant to notice. But with video, artefacts stand out hard and a single bit error can do that.
I did Video-conferencing in the late 90's and 128Kbps H320 VC link's worked for most and if you wanted to roll-out the red carpet you would bond 6 channels for 385kbps and that was with dedicated ASICS using codecs far weaker than what you can run in the background upon today's disposable CPU's and that shows how far things have moved in raw processing power. Back then to do conference calls you would need a MCU (Multipoint Control Unit) and those would be many hundred of thousands. Today, you have all the raw CPU power to do that on your mobile phone.
Most people’s issues with poor video call quality aren’t related to the last mile bandwidth, but instead to poor WiFi connections in the house. I’ve been pulling Ethernet cables through my house to fix this and it’s made a big difference. It also makes everyone else’s WiFi connections marginally better when I’m no longer competing for the airwaves.
A secondary issue is overloaded neighborhood cable termination nodes. Comcast is pretty slow at node splitting, leaving nodes overloaded for months on end with no alternatives available for people in areas where it’s Comcast or bust.
There’s issues aplenty, but it’s not with sufficiently provisioned 3 or 5 Mbps upload bandwidth.
They give us nothing, not even simple bitrate or resolution and fail to tell us really anything.
I’ve grown incredibly skeptical of anyone who says internet speed of X is “good enough.”
It wouldn’t shock me in the slightest if we were to learn this study was funded by AT&T or Verizon.
(writeup and stats, you can just look at the graphs: https://arahayrabedian.github.io/cable-to-dsl/ )
If you participate in video conferences, do yourself a favor and buy a "HDMI capture USB stick" so you can hook up your "real" camera to your PC and get a great image.
They cost less than $20, work with Windows, macOS and Linux and don't even require any drivers.
Some of the fairly recent cameras also support a USB connection directly.
A camera shutter is more likely to wear out than the sensor stopping working
Could be your local network, could be a poor cable somewhere between you and the CMTS, could be the node is overloaded and doesn’t have enough trunk bandwidth, could be poor peering. Could be lots of things, but it’s not your provisioned connection.
Provisioning a higher bandwidth connection on the same infrastructure wouldn’t fix any of that.
I had significant upstream issues that were caused by frayed coax cable coming from the street pole to the house. Technician replaced the cable and it’s been flawless ever since. Google Meet calls work great over my 75/15 connection and wired Ethernet.
What's that like with 600ms+ latency?
I'm wondering whether it will work in my van but don't know anyone who has tried it.
Would it be asking too much to expect an employee to keep in touch with work via videoconferencing regularly through geostationary satellite? Or is it bearable?
Internet service via satellites in low earth orbit (LEO) can achieve 20-50ms RTT.
edit: (context: this wasn't loading for a bit... seems to be working now)