Video phones in India

kgopalan

We are moving from California to India and are researching ways to chat with our family by using video phones. Does anyone have any information or experience using a video phone to talk to the U.S.?

psy_ko

there are softwares available that can allow u to use video phone as a webcam

my suggestion : buy a webcam instead, they are cheap here, starting at $15-20

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Radjesh

Buy a web cam and talk using Skype, Google talk or Yahoo

puchoo

i would go the webcam and skype way as well.

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praveen_yadlapalli

I don't think video phones work in India.

3G is yet to come in India, expecting it soon.

The_Londoner

3G is not as yet available in India. From what I understand, even MMS may not be available on most networks. So Video call is out of question. As many said, webcam is probably your answer, though not flexible to use en route.

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praveen_yadlapalli

instead of webcam say laptop [:P]

Nick-H

"Laptop"

There, I said it!

But yes, good idea, skype or similar, and laptop for travel.

Most of this stuff which is available on my new phone is not supported by the network.

Broadband here is not very broad, and probably not available outside the cities, but should be fine if you are coming to a city.

Where are you coming to?

And welcome to Indiamike.com! )

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brownboy66

and not only is it not very broad on occasions, there are other problems to contend with (DNS failures, congestion on primary routes, no secondary/ backup routes, etc) - all of which conspire to make interactive applications like voice or video over IP challenging at times.

Best thing to do though is as suggested above - try out a webcam and application like skype (and if it doesn't work you wont have wasted vast sums of money to find out).

and if you're moving to one of the larger cities you shouldn't have any problems purchasing any of the kit here.....

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The_Londoner

I'm slightly off topic here..

Broadband in India in city like Bangalore, is high speed Broadband available? Say 4mb or 8mb? And is connection good enough for Slingbox video stream?

brownboy66

Bangalore should be fine (it is the hi tech business capital after all). Full rate DSL (up to 8 meg) is available from the likes of airtel and BSNL - and then you have various cable connections as well (sify for example).

The real issue is backhaul. Some of the wireless providers for example advertise on the basis of say a 24 or 52 meg wifi connection - but they may be operating on a 4 or 10 meg backhaul for all their traffic (so you know where the congestion is going to occur). Also they tend not to mention that the wifi is half duplex (so its half the bandwidth each way...)

Following that - there's also the question of how many hops from destination to source. From here in Delhi to IM, for example, its 15-16 hops - (and the latency really kicks in with the handover from MTNL to VSNL network).

I can't imagine that Bangalore would be as bad though given the number of major telco/ IT vendors there.....

Nick-H

How many indeed

And so many of them dashed!

brownboy66

and did you see "the wife is half duplex" (have quickly repaired that one...)

Nick-H

To my eternal regret I did not.

Damn. That might have been the best IndiaMike Typo ever.



But I do suspect a freudian slip there: the i and e do not even come under the same hand on the keyboard!

brownboy66

phew!