Calculating Network Bandwidth Needs for Adobe Connect

by Mark Douglas

March 15, 2018

At CoSo, when bring on a new customer or when our Enterprise or Government customers bring on a new office, we commonly get questions about how to figure out the bandwidth needs for that office to support Adobe Connect and questions about best practices to avoid potential latency and/or problems in the meeting as they pertain to the network.  When thinking about the performance of your Connect instance, we generally consider the following:

• How many users will be using Adobe Connect simultaneously from the single office location?
• Will the meeting be using High Quality Video?
• Will the meeting be VOIP only or use integrated telephony?
• Will there be screen sharing or will uploaded documents be shared instead?
• Are there any proxies or network components that could introduce latency on the network?

Adobe provides good resources on how to estimate bandwidth and avoid issues.  Here are some of our favorites:

• The following link from Adobe provides detailed information on about how to determine bandwidth needs and also information on how to reduce latency: http://blogs.adobe.com/connectsupport/connect-9-5-bandwidth-utilization-estimates-illustrated/
• For a basic idea and quick calculations of bandwidth needs, this blog is useful: http://blogs.adobe.com/connectsupport/estimating-bandwidth-consumption/

As the questions above suggest, your bandwidth numbers would be based on your use case–what you are sharing, if you are using video and/or VOIP, what quality settings are enabled, and how many people you are sharing your screen with.  If your environment is low bandwidth, Connect does have ways for the meeting host to reduce bandwidth consumption and optimize performance.  Here is an article that describes what you can do:  https://www.cosocloud.com/blog/tips-for-using-adobe-connect-with-low-bandwidth