Free teleconferencing for Windows

[Pingu]

There's talk of using Teams at my work 

[Mrs Pingu]

We started on Webex, started to move to Skype but now Teams is starting to rear its head. So now we're using a mix of all three. Zoom and Slack are something I've only heard of here in the last couple of weeks.

Of course, once the umbilical cord to Mother Redacted has been cut I expect we'll be back on tin cans and string.

[ian]

Teams seems to crap out the audio on me, far more than Webex. No idea why, you'd think if the broadband can handle 4k streaming it would handle a bit of audio without stuttering into periodical incomprehensibility. Walking upstairs and sitting next to the router doesn't make any difference.

[rogerzilla]

Teams works pretty well for us.  As a video conference or teleconference application, it's fine.  As a chat application, it's massively worse than Skype (you can't delete or export a chat).  As a file sharing/collaboration application, it sucks ass.

[pcolbeck]

Teams seems to crap out the audio on me, far more than Webex. No idea why, you'd think if the broadband can handle 4k streaming it would handle a bit of audio without stuttering into periodical incomprehensibility. Walking upstairs and sitting next to the router doesn't make any difference.

4K streaming, well streaming of any kind is buffered that's the difference. Real time audio is almost completely unbuffered, if the packets don't get there 150 milliseconds after you speak you might as well not have sent them. Jitter of more than 30 milliseconds will also screw it up.

[ian]

Fair enough, but Webex audio was fine and Facetime is fine, but Teams isn't. I could ask our IT team...

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[pcolbeck]

Teams will be pushing all the video and voice streams through a "conference bridge" server that's probably sitting in one of your own data centres somewhere.  Webex is usually using one off Cisco own servers as the bridge (they usually sell it as a service rather than you owning your own back end kit). Same for Facetime. Also when only two people are involved eg Facetime between two people or Skype or usually any VoIP or Video between two people the voice and video goes direct between them rather than through a bridge as with conferencing to more than two people.