iChat AV Bandwidth Requirements

[jrober]

Please can you assist, I am looking at buying broadband for my home use. The primary use is for my family to chat using iChat AV in Jaguar, with me while I am away on business. I will have a 512k download speed with 256k upload and be using a firewire digital camcorder as the webcam. This is running on an iMac G3 600Mhz. On the other end we will have a similar or faster conncetion and a G4 iBook or Powerbook running Panther with an iSight.

I need to work out what download amount to buy from my Broadband supplier, so therefore want to work out how many Meg per Min iChat would use.

How do I calculate this?

The options I have are 1Gb 2Gb 3Gb and Unlimited per month but don't want to buy too much if not required as 12 month contract is necessary.

Thanks in advance

 

[flyfish29]

I need to work out what download amount to buy from my Broadband supplier, so therefore want to work out how many Meg per Min iChat would use.

How do I calculate this?

The options I have are 1Gb 2Gb 3Gb and Unlimited per month but don't want to buy too much if not required as 12 month contract is necessary.

Thanks in advance

Are you sure you are not talking hard drive storage space with 1Gb, 2Gb, etc.? Unlimited is not really possible with download as far as I know. Would be nice though

As far as download specs go, check out this page- there is a chart with speed needs, but lower speeds will work, but not as high of quality I guess.

http://www.apple.com/ichat/

 

[crazzyeddie]

Some ISPs limit the total downloads you can do per month in GB. I would say go for unlimited per month. Everyone I know who has download limits always worry about going over their cap. iChat will use the full 256k/sec for upload, and the upload will be equal to the max upload of the person you are chatting with, so maybe up to 512k/sec. Thats 768kbps, which is about 96KBps... so thats about 5.625MB per minute... or 337.5MB per hour. So if you do NOTHING ELSE but video chat, you would burn through 3GB in about 9 hours. So if youre going to do even 6 hours of video chat per month, I would strongly consider unlimited. Most people find it best to do unlimited even if they do no video chats.