Subject: A remote participant's review of the webex service for IETF76

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:24:46 -0500

Hi,

I thought it might be useful to have some feedback on how well the
webex approach worked for IETF76.

I participated in BEHAVE on Wed. morning, remotely.  I presented that
way too.

I want to thank first of all the Chairs (Dave Thaler and Dan Wing) for
supporting this experiment and for their assistance, and also the
volunteers who made this possible, as well as to Alexa who apparently
did quite a lot of co-ordination.  I assume the service was also a
donation from Cisco, so thanks also to them.  It enabled me to do work
while still meeting some obligations at home.

For a remote listener, the service was reasonably good.  One thing
made it notably better than the usual audio feed + slides from agenda:
the slides for every presenter aren't always available in advance, and
in the absence of Chairs who are willing to tell people that they
don't get to have slides at all if they're not on the site in time,
being able to see the slides that weren't otherwise available was a
big help.

The audio was somewhat less good than the usual audio feed:
compression artifacts were quite noticable, especially from the floor
mics.  It seemed to be slightly better synchronized, however, which
makes me think they're trading off audio quality for timeliness (a
reasonable trade).  This occasionally garbled some participants'
remarks pretty badly, particularly those with heavily accented
English.  It was ok for me, but I suspect someone listening for whom
English is also a second language might have some trouble.

We also had some hiccups in the audio at the beginning, which meant
that the audio feed dropped completely twice.  The Chairs dealt with
it, but it caused me to use the traditional audio feed as a backup.

I had some very short remarks to make about a draft, so the Chairs
suggested I could make them remotely.  I was using my telephone
(because I was using the audio feed as a backup -- there was also an
option to use a computer-based headset, which I started with until I
wanted the audio feed too).  Apparently I was very quiet in the room,
which made things a little awkward (I gather the local mics needed to
be turned way down).  I could also hear myself, somewhat delayed,
which made things a little odd.  We never would have made it work
without another communication medium, because it took several tries
(with Jabber "can you hear me now?"s) before we were both sure
communication was happening.  Fiddling with this used up a small
amount of meeting time, but not a huge amount.  It'd probably be a
huge amount if everyone wanted to do this or if a lot of
response-at-the-mics wanted to use it.  From reading the transcription
in the Jabber room, however, the propositional content came across.
Given an apparent delay in a two-way conversation with one of the
Chairs, I also think there was some considerable lag.

Compared to the use of Webex for fully virtual meetings, I think that
the webex use in this case is less good.  Compared to nothing at all,
this is an improvement.  I don't think it would work for a regular
meeting if a significant minority of people wanted to participate
remotely via webex, but as long as this kind of participation is the
exception rather than the rule, it seemed to work.  If the goal is to
make this useful as a more or less complete substitute for the regular
WG meetings, I think there's still work to be done.  I think some
additional trials are undoubtedly in order, but it will be important
to weigh the costs to meeting time, flow of discussion, and so on (as
well as any monetary cost that gets added as a result of this
additional bit of operations for meetings).

Hope this is useful.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]
Shinkuro, Inc.

---

From: "Bernard Aboba" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:42:34 -0800

Andrew said:

"I think some
additional trials are undoubtedly in order, but it will be important
to weigh the costs to meeting time, flow of discussion, and so on (as
well as any monetary cost that gets added as a result of this
additional bit of operations for meetings)."

I have some of the same observations as Andrew.  Generally, WebEx provided
value above and beyond the slides, streaming audio and jabber room.  Other
than the time zone difference (had to start a second workday from 4 PM -
midnight), I was surprised at how well remote participation worked;
streaming audio quality was excellent.  As for cost, given the savings from
remote participation, I'd have no problem contributing to any operational
cost that might arise from (increased) use of WebEx.

---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:49:14 +0900

Just checking - do people have experience with remote participants 
interacting with other remote participants using WebEx at our meeting this 
week?

We were using a non-WebEx conferencing system in MEDIACTRL (because media 
guys have their own :-) but also had key participants on Jabber (not 
everyone remotely was on the conferencing system). It was amazing how long 
the latency seemed to be when we asked remote participants using the audio 
stream questions on the audio stream, before answers came back on jabber ...

If WebEx is an improvement for interaction between remote participants, that 
would be lovely!

Spencer

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From: "Adrian Farrel" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:49:02 -0000

I had a report (MPLS this morning)...

Audio on Webex is not allowed in some people's companies

Chair has to be really careful to make sure they are sharing the right 
thing! It being a bit harder for the remote participant to intervene and 
tell anyone. Best to have someone monitoring the Webex in the room.

A
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bernard Aboba" <[email-masked]>
To: "'Andrew Sullivan'" <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>; 
<[email-masked]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 5:42 AM
Subject: RE: A remote participant's review of the webex service for IETF76

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:14:04 -0500

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 02:49:14PM +0900, Spencer Dawkins wrote:
> long the latency seemed to be when we asked remote participants using the 
> audio stream questions on the audio stream, before answers came back on 
> jabber ...

I noticed the lag in BEHAVE, but just now in DNSOP when Peter Koch
(Chair) gave timestamps for the audio recording, it matched my clock.
I think the lag is different depending on the room or something.  The
audio feed at this meeting is, IMO, stellar.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]
Shinkuro, Inc.

---

From: Joel Jaeggli <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:58:20 +0900

Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>> long the latency seemed to be when we asked remote participants
>> using the audio stream questions on the audio stream, before
>> answers came back on jabber ...
> 
>  I think the lag is different depending on the room or something.

Different http mp3 streaming clients prefer buffers of varying
depths. They can be tuned to a certain extent (e.g. itunes and vlc among
other have a knobs for this).

I proposed the use of this particular approach due to it's ubiquity and
robustness, it's not particularly well suited to low-latency requirements.

> The audio feed at this meeting is, IMO, stellar.

The IAD found room in the budget to refresh the equipment and thanks
should properly go to Ray for that.

---

From: Joel Jaeggli <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:05:35 +0900

>From my perspective the value of webex is the pstn interconnection...

Presumably they still have phones?

FWIW the rooms are actually dialed into the webex bridge  via sip->pstn.

> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bernard Aboba"
> <[email-masked]>

---

From: Stewart Bryant <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:10:06 +0000

MPLS this morning was not an official IETF Webex session. We were not 
meeting in one of the rooms equipped with Webex audio support and both 
the IETF Webex host accounts were in use by other WGs. Because of 
requests for Webex coverage we used someone's company a/c to allow the 
slides to be projected and emailed the connection details to the MPLS-TP 
list. We always expected that users would need to use m/c audio to 
listen, and I know of at least one person that did that. I guess that 
was omitted from the mail.

Both the PWE3 slots - the second of which will be MPLS-TP work - will be 
in audio supported rooms.

- Stewart

Adrian Farrel wrote:
> thing! It being a bit harder for the remote participant to intervene 
> and tell anyone. Best to have someone monitoring the Webex in the room.
>
> A

---

From: "Scott Lawrence" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:07:10 -0500

On Wed, 2009-11-11 at 01:14 -0500, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

>   The

I listened in on the WG Training session remotely and the audio was so
good that I could even hear most people who were clearly not standing at
the mics.

Indeed, that session turned out to not be in the room that I'd been told
it would be in, so I had the interesting experience of "roaming" through
the channels during the Wednesday lunch break, listening for the session
I was looking for.  I tried several before I found it, and could clearly
hear many voices on most channels.    I recognized voices of many
friends and acquaintances.  Pay attention to the warnings you've seen
about conversations in meeting rooms not being private - they are not...

That experiment also brought home how much more broadly international
we've become - the casual lunchtime conversations were quite often not
in english.