Video Conferencing on a budget.

Holding our monthly company wide meetings have always been problematic, one problem is half the team is in India and the other half in Milwaukee. Other problems include 512kbps bandwidth for the team in India, also the lack of will to spend $10k (per location!) on a Polycom solution.

Having two groups of people in their respective conference rooms and trying to hold a discussion has proven to be very different than sitting in front of your computer, wearing a headset and chatting over Skype. The microphone has problems picking up individuals in the room, the use of external speakers causes horrendous feedback, and the low video resolution that didn't matter before, matters now because we can't make out individuals in the room.

So I was appointed to do a little research into solving this issue. Had I been given a budget of $20,000 it would of been quite a simple job, buy a couple of Polycom systems and be done with it, however my budget was in the 'something reasonable' range.

I decided to try out iChat on the Mac, mainly because I have family in Scotland and Australia and have a lot of experience with using it for video conferencing, and swear by it. The biggest problem with iChat would be firewall configuration, but since we have an inter-office VPN, it's not a problem at all. To make this choice even easier, we already had a Mac Mini in the office in India.

Setting up a test was simply getting Geoff to bring in his MacBook Pro to our next company meeting. Setup was quite painless, we did get a 'insufficient bandwidth' error, but solved that by dialing down the speed from 'unlimited', and then it was up and running.
The results were very positive, the video was by far the best quality we have ever had, nice high resolution, we could see everyone in the room very clearly. The audio was more of a mixed bag, on the up side the feedback/echo was very slight, but on the downside the mic had trouble picking people up in the room and speakers were quiet even with the volume maxed out to ten, I think it's the first time I've really wished that we could turn speakers up to eleven.

Since then I have researched external speaker/microphones and was able to locate a higher end combo made by ClearOne, called the Chat 50, its quite pricey at $130, but if it solves our sound problems it will be worth every penny.

Since the test went so well we will be purchasing a Mac Mini and iSight for the Milwaukee office, and also a Chat 50 to try out.

All in all the total cost will be about $900, with maybe some potential cost savings by getting a refurbished Mac Mini.

Definitely something reasonable.