It would look like a bad cartoon, at best. You may not need to, or even want to, see every video from every location all the time, so you need a way of selecting which sites you see. You may want to let sites connect or disconnect from the conference at various times. And maybe these broadcast viewers need to be able to contribute but only with audio or maybe just by voting. Finally, you probably want to record the conference, which might be a video recording, an audio recording, or transcription.
Modems actually recover most of their capacity by using complex data compression techniques.
Techies place capacity in a hierarchy, and in categories of services. You can see why we're using a nice simple measure. Transmission measures are for how much information can be moved across a link, while switching measures are for the total amount of information, from all links, that can pass through a node. The following table shows some common transmission methods and their capacity. Reliability Service reliability is directly related to infrastructure.