While I have a Comcast broadbad connection, some of the people I call only have a slow modem connection. What are the bandwidth requirements for the connection? What speech codec is used? Also what is the size of the Java applet that the user has to download everytime they visit theswitchboard.ca?
We have implemented theswitchboard.ca so that it will work for people with slow connections and obviously fast ones too. There is a checkbox in the app which reads "enable low bandwidth mode" for people with slow connections which will require less bandwidth (the voice quality has to suffer a little bit, but not too badly).
The Java applet is only a few 100K, so you don't have to worry about the download. Obviously, if you are on a slow connection, you must be a bit patient :)
My brother in Johannesburg and I (in Canada) are using TheSwitchboard (thatnks you guys!). In South Africa, the ADSL has "caps", and his is 3GB per month.
After our 40 minute call last night, my brother wrote:
"Dude,
Have you a genius way of establishing how many Mb of send and receive we did on our chat?
I went from 30% to 100% of my 3Gb cap last night: either your nephew and my son Sam downloaded twice the 400Mb of albums he intended, i.e. 800Mb (and was "sucked" by peer-to-peer sharing for another 1.2Gb); or maybe our voice exchanges are "free" except in the bandwidth they consume, which is more limited here than at your end.
Maybe TheSwitchboard has a way of telling or showing that you are aware of.
I noticed that 1:2 ratio of receive:send in a previous month we were capped... maybe it was *also* a voice-call!"
My question? In plain terms, how much bandwidth is used per minute on a direct TheSwitchboard call? (ie. how much in each of normal and in low quality mode.) And does the use or non-use of high audio quality mode also affect bandwidth usage? If so, by how much?
This would be useful info for users in areas of highly rationed international bandwidth (like South Africa).
Here is a breakdown for the unfortunate cap'd people out there :):
normal bandwidth: 4.2 KB/s up, 4.2 KB/s down
low bandwidth: 2.4 KB/s up, 2.4 KB/s down
Another factor to consider is if your connection happens to drop packets at a high rate the switchboard will compensate by sending more data to offset this loss (this helps the voice quality by reducing choppiness). The maximum bandwidth cost of this will be twice what I listed above.
Using the data above, a typical high bandwidth call will consume ~30 megabytes of bandwidth in an hour, and the worst case would be ~60 megs, so I don't think your voice chats are responsible for the cap being reached. I'd look into the file sharing as a possible culprit :).
Oh and high quality vs low quality mainly affects CPU usage, not bandwidth usage. That said, because of the nature of the different codecs used, high quality, low bandwidth happens to use the least bandwidth (marginally) of all possible configurations.
