It is a rare case to have an entire company meeting held using Web Conferencing, mostly because of the fact that most web conferencing vendors do not adequately scale. Some vendors cap the amount of attendees at 20, 100, or 200. Occasionally you will find one that allows up to 1000 users. That’s why last week’s stress tests by the Web Conferencing Council turned some heads, when they successfully completed a 2,500 account test using VIA3, simulating a company meeting held on a fast corporate internet. Due to VIA3’s unique bandwidth management, and the ability to invite “audience only members”, VIA3 was able to continually scale as far as the bandwidth and numbers would allow.
The audience mode for VIA3 lets people view the meeting, complete with rich audio (VOIP), rich video, presentations, whiteboards, voting, group chat, and more. Because they are not projecting their own audio or video, their impact to the overall bandwidth is minimal. Audience members can interact with the speaker(s) by utilizing group chat, where they can comment or quiz using text input.
In a follow-up meeting with VIA3 CEO Brian Hodges, he admitted that even he did not know the ceiling for attendees in a meeting. “Internally we’ve had a successful 1,000 person meeting with 2 presenters, and (after seeing the testing by the Web Conferencing Council) we now know VIA3 can scale much, much higher. We also consistently beat competitors like WebEx on other scalability issues like Multi-Point presenter video. They cap the limit at six, where we don’t have a cap at all, other than your own bandwidth. From a technology perspective, we (VIA3) can handle a full corporate meeting for any of the fortune 500 companies who have adequate internet pipes, which is already the norm.”
The Web Conferencing Council has not stated a date for the release of their stress tests, as they have several still pending.
Hopefully, improvements like this are going to continue to fuel the growth of the Web Conferencing industry as a whole.
Anyone planning a large scale online meeting will want to try VIA3, which has a 15 day free trial at www.VIA3.com.
Contact:
Brian Back
VIA3.com
Scottsdale, AZ
866-265-8060
brianbackup@
http://www.via3.com
