3CX for Webinars

[DaleT]

I am looking at hosting a few webinars. Can anyone share the experience between using 3CX vs Zoom for webinars?

 

[VoIPTools]

DaleT,

I have used tools like GoToWebinar, Skype, Google, Zoom, Teams, and others to demo our 3CX add-on tools. It is not unusual for us to have 100+ participants. I have found the 3CX webinar (classroom) feature works very well and it's essentially free. What's not to like about that!? I have nothing but praise for the tool.

Having said that, reading the forums it appears 3CX is in the process of expanding their MCUs to handle the increased demand caused by the virus situation. I wouldn't be surprised if competitive products are having similar growing pains right now. I have seen some reported issues the last couple of days as 3CX retires some MCUs and brings up new ones to handle the increased demands. I know 3CX is working hard to expand the available resources and my guess is that this is a very temporary issue and perhaps has already been addressed.

I monitor the forums every day and I have seen some people offer what I feel are fairly minor requests for enhancements, but in my experience, the tool is excellent and I've stopped using all the other competitor's tools. From a sales perspective, using the webinar feature in your day-to-day business is an excellent opportunity to showcase to potential customers some of the tangible benefits of moving to 3CX.

Is the tool perfect every time? For me, it has been consistently reliable, but as with any tool, your bandwidth, and the bandwidth of all the participants may impact the quality of the audio/video. We have a large office in India and sometimes the internet pipe between the USA and India has been oversubscribed, but that's not the fault of 3CX.

Here is the thing... you don't have to take my word for it. You can easily try it for yourself. In my opinion, it is a great tool and is pathetically simple for both the organizer and participants to use.

 

[DaleT]

Matthew -

Thank you for this! What a great explanation!

Dale

 

[hood]

Very good response Matthew.

Our recent experience is that it struggled when we are using it as a Web Meeting with lots of us sharing video and audio. The CPU load on the end devices decoding 6+ video streams sits around 100%.

I'm not sure how iPad and mobile devices cope with this, if I'm experiencing this on my i7 based device.

We have had a similar meeting using Teams, and everyone reported ~20-30% lower CPU load for the same number of participants.

For Webinar, and small one on one or 3 party meetings it is perfectly fine and I cannot fault it, it just struggles a bit with large numbers of people sharing video

 

[JohnS_3CX]

A note on CPU usage: The video streams are decoded on your local machine, and your own stream is also encoded on your local machine. The more participants you add (and depending on the video quality settings you chose) the more load the system will have. Even if the MCU can send you 100 streams (bandwidth-wise) you still need to decode/encode locally at each endpoint.

Newer CPUs that support native video decoding/encoding of modern web codecs (in hardware) will fare better than others that need to decode/encode in software mode. Mobile devices are usually weaker in raw power, but make up for it by having hardware encoders/decoders built in, so they may deal with it much better than say, the average laptop.