We're talking tiny, murky, jerky pictures with broken-up sound and four seconds of delay. Plus, if you take all this to heart, you'll be in good shape to take advantage of increased bandwidth that's promised to arrive with the DSL cavalry. I tested eight leading videophone software packages and the two main types of camera. Cameras were installed into four different computers, including two in which the OS had just been freshly installed on a blank hard drive. You plug a microphone and video camera into your computer, log on to the Internet, and run the videophone software.
Low bandwidth means tiny, jerky pictures.
The problem is, we're trying to squeeze a moving color picture through two phone wires that were originally designed for low-fi speech communication. The symptom of an ISP-based problem is seen when, in the middle of a conversation, everything freezes up. I tried four ISPs and found noticeable differences. These slow-downs, currently obscured by our relatively slow modems, will become more obvious when we obtain faster access. Worse, those faster in-home connections will allow home users to use more bandwidth, further contributing to the overload.