Maximum Skype video application via 802.11a point to point link
Hi to all,
I am new here.
I am part of a company that providing a wireless solution (802.11 solutions to our customer). I have a technical problem regarding the limitation of 802.11a for video that's why I am accidentally found this site. Please help me.
This is the scenario. Pls. see attached diagram.
We provide a wireless point to point link (802.11a link) to our customer that attains 6 Mbps throughput. Our customer uses it for video applications using skype. They come to us complaining that our radio has a poor performance.
They said that if only 3 PC running skype video and voice, the connection is still okey. But the time they add 1 PC, means 4 PC simultaneously running skype video and voice, internet connection will down.
I don't know what causes the problem. Is it really our equipment (even it is providing 6 Mbps) or it is normal limitation of 802.11a technology. Please help me configure the problem. We will surely lost this customer if we don't give a valid reason or solution in the issue. Please give me the reason behind it if it has
Is this 1 customer using 4 pc's? If so, 6mbs isnt alot to share between them. Thats only 1.5mbs allocated to each computer, which would be plenty of bandwidth if they were just doing voice calls. Once you start streaming video though, it eats up bandwidth pretty quickly, especially if 4 people are doing it. I don't believe you or your equipment are at fault here, the customer needs to understand that there are limits. think of it this way, you wouldn't set up an office building with 100 computers with a 6mps link would you? The cold hard fact is that there are limits to what you can do, you need to explain this to your customer so that they understand that while it is possible to hold 3 video calls, that 4th one puts them over their bandwidth limit. you may want to do some kind of bandwidth audit to be sure this is whats happening first. If you offer a higher speed service, maybe let them try it for a week to see if that serves them better.
Skype automatically uses the highest framerate for video that the computer is capable of capturing. If you can have the customer make changes to their skype configuration (which is stored as an xml file in each user's application data directory) then the framerate can be dropped to ~5fps which should lower the video bandwidth.
Ignore the remainder of the tutorial (ffdshow, etc) and concentrate on lowering the frame rate to 5fps and limiting the resolution to 320x240 or 640x480 at the very most.
The config file is located in the c:\documents and settings\<user name>\Application Data\Skype\<skype username> folder
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