Businesses Insider South Africa compared the bandwidth requirements of Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Google Hangouts Meet and WhatsApp. The same goes for the amount of devices you have on your WiFi at the same time.

The more people who are on the call, the higher that bandwidth requirement gets. The actual average speeds will be slower, depending on the time of day and how many people are on the internet.ĭifferent platforms have different bandwidth requirements, which means matching their requirements to your internet speed will give you a decent idea if it’s going to work or not. If you have a 10mb up and 10mb down uncapped ADSL line, this will be the maximum speed you will be able to stream at. For online gaming and watching HD videos an 8Mbps line is required. The higher the bandwidth the higher the speeds you can download and upload files, and thus the higher the video quality you can stream a conference call at. Business Insider South Africa previously reported that an average internet user requires about a 4Mbps line for watching YouTube videos, and using services like Facebook and Instagram. It’s defined by ISPs as download and upload speeds, with 'up' referring to speed sending data from your modem to the internet, and 'down' to the speed at which your modem can download data from the internet. Simply put, bandwidth refers to how much data, in megabytes (Mb), can be transmitted per second from the internet to your device (Mbps). Video conferencing platforms like Skype, Zoom and Microsoft Teams require constant packets of data being sent and downloaded in real time, unlike YouTube or Netflix where videos can buffer. Bandwidth plays a huge role in video conferencing. data for March shows a sharp decline in mobile download speed in South Africa. On top of that, the surge in internet traffic has resulted in a degradation in speeds for fixed and mobile broadband since March 2020, as more people stream from their homes rather than work as they go into lockdowns, according to data compiled by Ookla’s, which allows users across the world to test their internet download, upload and latency speeds. For one, South Africa has very expensive home fibre and mobile data is also extremely pricey. TechCrunch reported there was a record breaking 62 million downloads of video conferencing apps in just one week in March as many countries went into lockdown, up 90% from the weekly average of business app downloads in 2019.īut while Europe, Asia and America can easily stream conference calls, South Africa has a very different environment.

Internet requirements for skype