Ok so right now I pay 12-13 bucks a month for my phone and internet. It is good for surfing the web and playing certain games but I have recently begun working for companies that require video chat and video conferencing a couple times a week. I need an upgrade. I have a few options. One is a USB network card supplied by a company, another is to buy a phone and use it as a hotspot. Or finally upgrade what I presently have to a higher speed but I have to research exactly how fast a speed they can provide. I would think that using a phone as a hotspot would be incredibly fast internet speed and convenient but also the most expensive. Any thoughts ?
In my personal experience my skype sessions average between 650 kB/s and 150 kB/s. It will depend on the quality of you call. High quality at 650 kB/s would consume 2.3 GB per hour and 150 kB/s would consume about 0.5 GB per hour. There is also the problem of reliability. In my personal experience, hotspots and mobile broadband are not a good combination when making a video call. Nothing more frustrating than a bad video conference connection.
Thanks Frogurt for your input. So you suggest I stay with my current ISP and just upgrade to their fastest service ? Presently when I use Skype the other person or person(s) can see me clearly but I cannot see them. Voice clarity is excellent though on both sides. I checked my internet speed rates and I am getting 0.5 mbps download speed and 0.45 mbps upload speeds approximately. So yea this is definitely not enough for any long term video conference call.
Well it depends on what country you are in. If you live in a country where the internet speed is generally creepingly slow you don't really have that much of a choice but to either call your ISP and ask for any other upgrade packages they have in stores.
In my own experience, ADSL is best for Skype rather than mobile 3G broadband. However, if you are only doing one call per month than maybe there is a local business that you could book a conference room to do the call. For example a hotel with business facilities and even cafes sometimes have meeting rooms with ADSL access. That might be a cheap alternative. If you are doing a higher volume of calls, than increasing your existing ADSL plan might be a good option, however 0.5 mB/s is not very fast generally speaking. Greater than 1mB/s would be twice as good and even my 3G mobile broadband gets better speeds than that. Don't forget to consider volume too. If you plan on making one hour low quality calls every week at 150kB/s than that is going to need 2GB of data over the month.
I'm dealing with something very similar. My mobile hot spot can easily be drained by streaming videos. Although it comes with my unlimited cell usage on my phone, its 5gig runs out too fast. I think high speed, and unlimited at home is the way to go. Less headaches if you ask me. And I'd rather stay connected and move quickly, than miss out on money to be made.
In my opinion mobile hot spots are much too expensive. I think my phone company wants $49.99 a month for just a few gig. Unlimited Internet can be incredibly cheap depending on which company you use. If you want to get it as cheaply as possible, my ex used to go from company to company and take advantage of their introductory specials, then move to another company when the price went up. Obviously this only works if there's no contract.
