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Comment by notyourwork | Hacker News Reader

The state of US technology has become embarrassing. How much bandwidth does a zoom video need?

Ajit Pai has held back the US and our economy with his action.

Edit: the exact Zoom bandwidth specs was rhetorical. Bandwidth should be symmetrical based on how we use it today and 3Mbps is too slow to support a household with multiple users.

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From the Zoom system requirements:

1:1 call

* 600kbps (up/down) for high-quality video

* 1.2Mbps (up/down) for 720p HD video

* Receiving 1080p HD video requires 1.8Mbps (up/down)

* Sending 1080p HD video requires 1.8Mbps (up/down)

Group call

* 800kbps/1.0 Mbps (up/down) for high-quality video

* For gallery view and/or 720p HD video: 1.5Mbps/1.5Mbps (up/down)

* Receiving 1080p HD video requires 2.5Mbps (up/down)

* Sending 1080p HD video requires 3.0Mbps (up/down)

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362023-System-r...

yes, but most households have more than 1 person living there and sharing the connection for their own Zoom or YouTube.

Now multiply that by 2.53 (average US household size in 2020) and you'll see why 3 Mbps are probably not enough.

Exactly my point! Consider a group of college students living together or an average family and we start to realize that its not about a single activity but the multiple parallel needs for the same shared pipe that causes congestion.

I find it surprising that so many seem to disagree that this is ridiculously low.

I am all for high bandwidth, but it blows my mind that people have the expectation to do video conferencing at 1080p quality. It is bluray quality, which was only available 10years ago in offline / disk format. It is great if we can but I wouldn't call it a requirement.

It's not really blu-ray quality though. You could have a 4K video conference at 1Mbps if you so wished, but it wouldn't look nice. Likewise a 1080p Zoom stream isn't really anything like a blu-ray video.

The quality may not be there but the pixel count is. I agree most webcams are not precise enough to give a real 1080p quality + bandwidth constraints. But you would be better off with a fluid 720p.

I'm surprised the screen-sharing bandwidth required is so low... I guess it must be quite low framerate? Because some of us have giant monitors...

Unless you're streaming video games (high FPS, as you noted the inverse, and significantly larger portions of the screen being refreshed, usually the entire one) the 'deltas' are relatively small. Combined with low frame rates, your usual business presentation occupies a small share of the bandwidth.

on the other hand, I'm mostly staring blankly at my webcam with a static background. though admittedly the webcam sensor is a lot noisier :)

but yeah, I suppose the update rate of most screen sharing is pretty low.

It's usually pretty easy to compress because you're so often sharing text on a solid background. I'm figuring that there's gotta be a higher bitrate for sharing, say, a movie or video game than sharing my jira board.

1Mbps for "high quality", 3Mbps for 1080p.

By what reasoning is 3Mbps not good enough for average member of the economy?

Because a household family uses internet for more then a single zoom video. If I have two kids and work from home, 3Mbps isn’t sufficient to support a house.

Or if you have two people at home working and doing web meetings. I've learned that lesson during COVID.

That problem can be solved very easily and very cheaply with better communication and scheduling rather than any sort of tech though.

Have all companies schedule all of their meetings based on their employee's housemates' meeting schedules in a different company? That doesn't sound very easy.

That's like saying we should just work different hours. Boom simple solution, just need to get 20 other people on board to work nights instead of days.

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