Our First Meeting in Cyberspace

On Saturday morning, January 1, 2011, about six TCPC members participated in our first meeting in cyberspace using the facilities of Skype Version 5.0 for Windows.

The Group Video Conferencing facility for Skype is currently in beta testing and only available on the Windows platform.  Even with that limitation, users running various platforms, including Mac OSX and Linux were able to participate via audio and IM.

We learned a couple of important lessons from this experience:

• Most importantly, the facility works!  It's not perfect, but it is still in beta testing.
• Skype is addressing support for various platforms based upon, it seems to us, popularity.
• The service's performance is apparently bandwidth sensitive.  Users with high speed DSL service, above the basic 1.5Mbs, saw good performance while users with slower connections, including 1.5Mbs DSL, had some problems.