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I just had the opportunity to put video conferencing to a real trial by fire in an unexpected setting – a hospital waiting room. The other challenge was making the link using only a cellular broadband card — no ethernet, no wifi.

Much to my surprise in conversations with both the Mac’s iChat doing video over AIM and Skype using video, the conversation and video were very usable. iChat compensated for the limited bandwidth by having good looking but more jerky video (fewer frames per second). Skype was smoother with a higher frame rate but was much fuzzier. It was definitely not on par with a high speed desktop connection, but the ability to have a video connection from essentially anywhere was pretty amazing.