We’ve all been on more than our fair share of video calls the past 14 months. And we’ve probably used all the different video calling platforms (including Sangoma Meet). Sometimes, we get some video quality issues such as the frames freezing or blocking out due to bandwidth reasons, especially when sharing documents. We’ve learned to live with the occasional problem. To me, this shows just how far IP communications have come in such a short period. What a long way from the early VoIP days in 1998. Even back then, we had visions of video and voice on the same call.
I’m sure we’ve all been on a call with over 50 video users with unbelievable video and voice and file sharing quality! Even just a couple of years ago, we couldn’t have proceeded like we’ve proceeded the past 14 months.
But the other day on a call was the first time I’ve experienced voice quality issues on such a call. These days, due to HD codecs and adaptive codecs, voice has stayed sounding consistently good. Really, voice sounds better than PSTN calls on all these video calls (if anyone even remembers what a PSTN call over G.711 sounded like anymore).
On this call, I was talking from my house to someone at one of our offices. I have 1 Gig at my home, and I’m usually pretty good with quality. And obviously, we have good internet going into an office. It turned out the office was experiencing some wifi issue in the building, so it had nothing to do with the video calling platform I was using (Sangoma Meet). And I have to say; even when the video went black, the voice kept going. It got wonky and such, but it kept on going. That’s because voice requires much less bandwidth. Voice will continue to be essential.