Can You See Me Now? A Measurement Study of Zoom, Webex, and Meet

TL;DR

This study systematically compares Zoom, Webex, and Meet through extensive measurements, revealing differences in latency, streaming quality, and the impact of session conditions on user experience.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive, reproducible measurement analysis of major videoconferencing platforms based on real-world data and diverse testing conditions.

Findings

Variations in geographic scope affect streaming lag.

Streaming rate changes depend on session size and device status.

Measurement methodology enables reproducible benchmarking.

Abstract

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, videoconferencing has become the default mode of communication in our daily lives at homes, workplaces and schools, and it is likely to remain an important part of our lives in the post-pandemic world. Despite its significance, there has not been any systematic study characterizing the user-perceived performance of existing videoconferencing systems other than anecdotal reports. In this paper, we present a detailed measurement study that compares three major videoconferencing systems: Zoom, Webex and Google Meet. Our study is based on 48 hours' worth of more than 700 videoconferencing sessions, which were created with a mix of emulated videoconferencing clients deployed in the cloud, as well as real mobile devices running from a residential network. We find that the existing videoconferencing systems vary in terms of geographic scope, which in turns determines streaming lag experienced by users. We also observe that streaming rate can change under different conditions (e.g., number of users in a session, mobile device status, etc), which affects user-perceived streaming quality. Beyond these findings, our measurement methodology can enable reproducible benchmark analysis for any types of comparative or longitudinal study on available videoconferencing systems.