International Skype Conferencing
How good is the international Skype conferencing on a Beijing DSL connection? After five weeks of doing Skype: pretty good, I have to conclude.
When we do the WikipediaWeekly podcast with others from around the world, we use Skype to conference call four to five people at a time. The group conversation is recorded, and one person (David Still, in Australia) usually edits it down to size. During recording, if network conditions are good, it sounds excellent - nearly as good as the ISDN lines radio stations use for studio quality.
This week I hosted the conference from a humble one megabit DSL connection in Beijing, connecting two folks from Australia, and one person from the continental United States. Later in the show, we had one fellow from Hawaii. It worked out great.
(When doing a multiway conference, Skype might choose another host for the conference among the participants, which seems to be the one with UDP port forwarding working. To our knowledge, I was the only one with it configured this way.)
