Video Conferencing through VPN

[CompuSecur]

Hello,
I'm new to this tek-tips web site.

I'm working on a project to do video-conferencing for distance learning at the local university.

Between universities there is no bandwidth problem but if a student is loggin on to the net from an ISP, the bandwidth is awfull and the video/audio suffers.
(I know that by regular modem it would be slow so I'm thinking of ADSL.)

I was wondering if creating a VPN might help to get better transmission.

I've heard that the video/audio part of the bandwidth for ISP's is minimal so by creating a VPN.

I'm thinking that the ISP won't see what's inside the tunnel so we might get better bandwidth and the video/audio might suffer less.

Any ideas or pointers about this situation would be greatly appreciated.

 

[MaxPipeline]

I can't say if what you are saying is true with regards to ISPs throttling video/audio (RTP) traffic. But if anything sending the traffic via a VPN may not help either. First of all you would need to make sure your users have the VPN client set up on their end to properly connect to your network. Second the extra overhead that the VPN will add to each packet will surely have the opposite affect in terms of performance. Third if your ISP is prioritizing your RTP traffic then I would pick a different ISP. But alot of ISP would likely not be giving lower priority to RTP traffic since that is the basis for most VoIP which benefits from higher priority tagging.