Before James was born, I got an iSight camera. I was testing it and the video conferencing (using Macs and iChat AV) was the best I’ve every seen, this side of dedicated hardware and network.
We’d been using MSN messenger to video chat with my in-laws on a PC for months and the experience was painful on the best of days.
While my father-in-law was here, I demonstrated how it worked and he was so impressed that he bought a Mac Mini and an iSight so they could stay in touch.
Before I purchased the computer for him, I located a couple people in Taiwan and tested video chatting and it worked just as well. (I also tested it with people in Vermont, Germany, England, Australia and New Zealand with similar results.)
But when my in-laws got back to Taiwan, the experience, although not as painful as MSN, just wasn’t very good.
So when I went to Taiwan in September, I brought along everything I needed to try to figure out why the experience was so bad. It didn’t require much diagnostics, my father-in-law’s high speed cable connection operated at a blistering 24k. He’d switched internet providers since our last trip and was paying for a connection that was frequently slower than a modem.
However, I had the darndest time convincing them that their connection was the problem.
Finally, Johnny (my brother-in-law), who likes to do online gaming, convinced his father to install an ADSL line, and now we great full screen chats and my wife’s parents can watch their grandchildren grow up even when they’re half a world away.
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