Google Meet is better than Cisco WebEx!

[Dieselboy]

I just had a call with total of 3 participants, the other two are a CEO and our country manager. Everyone working from home. The country manager is in Sri Lanka and has bit of a crappy internet connectio - maybe wifi interference or low bandwidth (don't know exactly).

We joined a webex meeting and the country manager's audio and video were really not that great at all. Here's what happened in the webex meeting:

- Video was showing but would freeze. it was not pixelated, in fact it looked OK quality. But it would freeze from time to time as well as occasionally showing a video feed, intermittently.

- Audio was also really poor. It would cut out completely and then all of a sudden play 5 or 10 seconds of audio all-at-once at super speed. I believe this to be a side effect of the audio codec but I don't really know why.

Since we're looking at maybe upgrading our existing Google Workspace subscription and replacing webex entirely, I suggested that we should move this call to a Google Meet to compare the experience. I was amazed!

Bearing in mind that the country manager does have something wrong with their internet connectivity, here's the Google Meet experience with the same devices and same internet connections:

- Video was pixelated but was usable to see face expressions. It played the video feed fine and did not freeze, although the video seemed to be a little bit behind the audio, so it was not in complete sync. Issues were expected but this video feed was entirely usable for the call.

- Audio - Audio played loud and clear and had a couple of small / minor break ups.  Did not have large break up gaps or play fast like WebEx. The voice was able to be followed fine.

Additionally, live captions seemed to work 100% of the audio even when there was the odd small breakup of the voice (I wonder if the live captions are processed locally on the users machine in this case).

Summary:

One of the biggest pain points I've had in the 7 or so years of having Cisco Webex and then Spark / Teams are these sorts of issues caused by literally anything in the path between the user (computer, wifi, internet, transit path etc) and Cisco server. Sri Lanka doesnt have a great internet infrastructure, many people use 4G which varies grately with latency and bandwidth. With Webex we were going to terminate the call and follow up with chat messages because it would have actually been better if the country manager was not present in the call at that time. Because of the long delays waiting for the audio to come back and then not being able to understand the super fast audio speed being played. Being able to launch into a Google meeting have actually be able to have the meeting without issue really impressed me because I knew that there were underlying issues with their connection.

What I'm saying is that with the same scenario between the two meeting products, the meeting was only successful with Google Meet.

[wintermute000]

Webex is getting over-run for sure. Its all either MS Teams because MS/O365, or Zoom.

I have had one or two on Google Meets, it seemed to work well.

[Dieselboy]

It's vastly improved within the last few months. Even the live captions that is available on Google Meet is not there on Cisco WeEx.

[wintermute000]

Yeah google quietly have some good products and pricing in the enterprise space. I'm fairly sure they're subsidising it in order to try to break into these established markets. It well known that GCE is cheaper than AWS or Azure but can't seem to get traction beyond dev startups and/or large scale 'white label' deals (e.g. hosting another company's SaaS/PaaS offering).

[icecream-guy]

here, were just dumping skype and moving over to Teams,  I don't find Teams as user friendly or intuitive.
we still have WebEx.

peeps in another group are trying to get a waiver to allow users connected to VPN, Teams access through split-tunnel, to provide more reliable connectivity, Cisco VPN can only do standard access lists, when applied to a group policy, so it's just to IP ( a large number of networks), without the 4 ports they request. ..... can of worms.

[wintermute000]

This is where I simply point to next-gen solutions or even just VPN clients that aren't stuck in 2010 and can use domain / process (though in fairness I'm almost positive AnyConnect can do this in latest versions, even if its kinda crappy e.g. O365 lists are static IP lists that you will need to water and feed instead of being auto-refreshed like a NGFW or cloud-based SWG / SD-WAN)

[Dieselboy]

here, were just dumping skype and moving over to Teams,  I don't find Teams as user friendly or intuitive.
we still have WebEx.

peeps in another group are trying to get a waiver to allow users connected to VPN, Teams access through split-tunnel, to provide more reliable connectivity, Cisco VPN can only do standard access lists, when applied to a group policy, so it's just to IP ( a large number of networks), without the 4 ports they request. ..... can of worms.

There was a time when I would log a TAC for webex and TAC would ask me if I'm using a VPN, like they were having a ton of issues attributed to RA VPN. Just mentioning this.

Yeah google quietly have some good products and pricing in the enterprise space. I'm fairly sure they're subsidising it in order to try to break into these established markets. It well known that GCE is cheaper than AWS or Azure but can't seem to get traction beyond dev startups and/or large scale 'white label' deals (e.g. hosting another company's SaaS/PaaS offering).

100% they're after MS business. Our quote for the top tier is considerably less than MS and they (Google) have promised that they will help with implementation to quickly achieve some targets which I have (like MDM and DLP). Very difficult to ignore.

[deanwebb]

I've done podcast interview recordings via Google Meet, it's that reliable and clear in normal circumstances. I'd also use Zoom as a go-to. Teams is next, Webex a hard no with my sound setup.