This research doesn’t take into account the potential external factors that can affect Internet performance in the home, from the placement of Wi-Fi routers, to building materials, to Wi-Fi interference, to the age and condition of the user’s connected devices, but it does provide a helpful illustration of the baseline capabilities of 25/3 broadband. The quality of all five sessions was good and consistent throughout, with no jitter, choppiness, artifacts, or other defects noticed during the sessions.
For this testing, the 25/3 service was over-provisioned by 25%, a typical configuration for this service tier.Īt a high level, we found that all three conferencing solutions could support at least five concurrent sessions on five separate laptops connected to the same cable modem with the above 25/3 broadband service and with all sessions in gallery view. Most broadband providers over-provision the broadband speeds delivered to customers’ homes – this is for assorted reasons including considering protocol overhead and ensuring headroom in the system to handle unexpected loads.
Various laptops were used, running Windows, MacOS and Ubuntu – nothing special, just laptops that were around the lab and available for use. Laptops used ethernet wired connections to the modem to ensure no variables outside the control of the service provider would impact the speeds delivered, and conferences were set up and parameters varied while traffic flow rates were collected over time. The modem was connected through the cable access network to a CommScope E6000 cable modem termination system (CMTS). Note that this modem is several years old and not the current DOCSIS 3.1 technology. A Technicolor TC8305c gateway was used, which is a DOCSIS 3.0 modem supporting 8 downstream channels and 4 upstream channels. Since this is CableLabs, we used DOCSIS® cable broadband technology. To avoid any appearance of endorsement of a particular conferencing application, we have not labeled the figures below with the specific apps under test. The data gathering used typical settings and looked at both upstream and downstream bandwidth usage from and to laptops connected by ethernet cable to a modem connected to a wired broadband connection.
The investigation looked at how many simultaneous conferencing sessions can be supported on the access network using popular software including Google Meet, GoToMeeting, and Zoom. In the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) defines broadband to be a minimum of 25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps upstream. With that in mind, we looked at how much video conferencing a broadband connection can support. Specifically, most of us use video conferencing for work, school and everyday communications. This year we have seen a shift toward working and learning from home and relying more on our broadband connection.