I’ve been talking to a friend about doing some contract work for her company. She says she’d hire me in a minute, except for one thing. I live 500 miles away, and her boss is a firm believer in having all the staff on the premises.
I’ve had good experience with working at a distance – I worked on a team at four locations in three cities and we communicated very smoothly – but we used standard conference calls and emails. We still got together face-to-face once a month or so.
I’m not looking for a sales pitch or a product demonstation, but can anyone share their experiences with the high-tech, whiz bang teleconferences which were supposed to make face to face meetings obsolete? Do you think you get as much out of them as an old-style business meeting? Anything you miss about the traditional meetings?
I worked in a big telecom manufacturer for 13 years (the big Canadian one whose stock tanked due to accounting problems) , and had my share of teleconferences, both the $20K room systems, and the PC-based ones on IP networks. To say I was underwheled would be being polite. My experiences ranged from having resolution so bad that you couldn’t tell if someone’s eyes were open or shut, never mind their non-verbal facial cues, to frame rates so low (4 frames / second) that it looked more like a collection of stills, or the animation you get when you flap the pages in a comic book, than TV. Sometimes the video lags behind the audio, so you get the “dubbed Hong-Kong kung-fu movie” effect or words out of sync with lips. Many people said they hated it because they claimed it made them look fatter. If the lighting is at all imperfect, it can have some major effects on image resolution. One time our remote location was backlit by a gorgeous sunset. All we could see was black outlines, then when they closed the blinds, the incandescent lighting made them all look jaundiced.
PC-based IP stuff can be better, if you have a well-engineered, QOS-enabled, smoking fast network the whole way, but with (even expensive) webcams at natural resolution, you see a 1.5" video window on a 20"screen. You should not attempt this if you are accessing your corporate intranet via a VPN tunnel through even a high–speed link (because your can’t get a full end-to-end QOS protocol link). Even on our our own network, which was supposed to showcase our broadband products, packet latency went into the toilet when you turned on video on our soft IP clients if you used a VPN connection.
All teleconference meetings I attended in the last 3 years used web-casting of power point charts only, with audio for voice ( and I attended a great many, more than I care to remember). The only video use was streaming of pre-recorded CEO speeches.
Things may have radically improved over the last 6 months, but, personally, I think decent quality corporate video conferencing is still a few years away, and will still require TV-studio-like (i.e. very expensive) facilities.
Sorry to be such a wet blanket; I would be delighted to be proven wrong.
We used videoconferencing equipment at my last office, mostly for conferencing among several offices with T1 or T3 connections between them. We usually had the equipment configured for a 300K connection. When we wanted to conference with people outside the company, we rented conference facilities at Kinkos locations (for about $200/hour). The quality was quite good, although we were using a lot of bandwidth.
(Now a minor nitpick. You used the word “teleconference” as a synonym for “videoconference” but I always thought teleconferences were audio-only.)
