Everyone measures the elements of an "ultimate Skype video experience" with different weights. The purpose of this series of articles is to discuss these elements and help you best manage those elements so you don’t have to give up your "nice to haves." To leave you speechless.

Most video applications suck up a lot of your Internet bandwidth. In fact most video applications are bandwidth hogs. The more animated you are the more bandwidth you consume and the more pixilated or blurry you will appear to your viewer. To get the most out of your video app you will want to know:

1. How to measure bandwidth
2. How much bandwidth you have
3. How much bandwidth your applications are consuming

The ultimate Skype Video experience requires a broadband connection. Most home broadband Internet connections are asymmetrical. This is a legacy idea from the dark ages of the Internet when most users were concerned about maximizing download speeds and greedy ISP with maximizing revenue. Thus many users have 128 kilobits/second (Kbs) upload and 256 download speeds. An upload speed of 128 Kbs may result in adequate or even good performance, but not the ultimate video performance. If you have 128 kbs of upload speed you will be using about 32 kbs for voice. That leaves a measly 96 kbs for video. Less actually, because nothing ever works at 100 percent and some bandwidth is always used for some housekeeping duties.

If you can afford to stay in the Calgary Marriott you can probably afford to buy the Internet if you could only find out who owns it. This Marriott provides a suburb in-room wired connection. We were both uploading 160 kbs for video and 32 kbs for a total of 192 kbs. Not only did Michael get his one click, "mom can use it simplicity," but the high bandwidth allowed us to move our heads from side to side about once per second and not get pixilation or a blurred image. And Michael noted that I have all my teeth.

I measure the bandwidth consumed by any application using NetPeeker. It is a shareware product available from www.net-peeker.com (if you miss the dash between ‘net’ and ‘peeker’ you will end up at a porn site).

I love this product. Been using it for over 18 months. Sent them my $25 two-days after I first downloaded it. A word of caution, keep your life simple turn off all the options. Just say no to firewalls, popup killers, and bandwidth throttles.

This screenshot shows my Skype Audio bandwidth during a test call. My upload bandwidth is shown as about 4 kilobytes per second or 32 kilobits per second (1 byte = 8 bits). If I was in call with Spontania’s Video4IM the product name will be listed alphabetically along with the corresponding upload and download bandwidth.
To find out your upload bandwidth visit my favourite measuring hole, PCPitstop.

Maybe you looked at your bandwidth as you read this story and I've left you kind of depressed. Don't be. Video apps are getting more sophisticated with each month that passes. Developers are using better bandwidth managing techniques, better codecs are emerging to compress more picture into a smaller bandwidth and users are getting smarter in managing lighting and buying better webcams. So the picture is getting brighter.