Google Meet bandwidth consumption

[jthompson]

Hi all

 

We're looking at the feasibility of delivering lots of lessons using Google Meet and I've been asked to give a ballpark figure for how many simultaneous lessons the school's Internet connection could support. We have a 200Mbps (synchronous) connection. This is assuming that teachers are in school, delivering Google Meet lessons to pupils at home.

 

Looking at Google's documentation, a "low quality" stream up from a client is 1Mbps, so our teachers would be consuming a minimum of 1Mbps each out to Google.

 

Does anyone know how I might estimate the downstream usage for X number of remote participants? I'm hoping it's not just going to be a minimum of XMbps down from Google.

[dhicks]

Does anyone know how I might estimate the downstream usage for X number of remote participants? I'm hoping it's not just going to be a minimum of XMbps down from Google.

 

Following the documentation link you gave, I went on to the "Prepare your network" page:

 

https://support.google.com/a/answer/1279090

 

Which seems to be suggesting an ideal bandwidth of 3.2 Mbps (both up and down) for "Group video meetings" per participant. If I'm reading that correctly, is that saying that each user needs 3.2 Mbps, there's no "central" device that needs 3.2 x X Mbps? I'm not sure how the Meet client requests video streams - does it get served one stream per participant from Google's servers? Does it get served one stream per participant that is on-screen at the time, so maybe one main speaker and a couple of others?

[jthompson]

Ta. The "low quality" option limits upstreams to 1Mbps, so my earlier calculations were slightly wrong in that it would be a maximum of 1Mbps for each teacher if we imposed that setting. Testing this at home, I'm seeing more like 500kpbs for a standard-def (360p) stream up from my computer of me waving my arms about, so I think we'll have plenty of upstream capacity. A static presentation slide was more like 100kbps.

 

I'm hoping that downstream videos are somehow amalgamated, or at least at a really low bitrate for any that aren't being displayed prominently. I think we're just going to see hoew it goes in practice, and adjust our approach accordingly, either by combining or staggering lessons, or asking pupils to mute their cameras. Teachers will soon know if we're asking too much of the bandwidth, since the user experience will be poor.

 

There's also the option in the admin console to default desktop users to audio only (although they retain the option to turn on their camera), which might help if we applied that to pupils.

[jthompson]

Further to this, the Google Meet quality tool in Admin shows me that most staff members' upstream videos have been somewhere around 200kbps in real-world usage.