work arounds.

We were doing a regional broadcast today and they kept losing the broadcast during second session. From how the picture was artifacting and poofing and how it was spooling it was obviously a bad internet connection. Since we were receiving via satellite I knew it wasn't on our end. Now being a mechanic I am used to asking the is it plugged in? does it have gas? type questions. So I decided to contact the broadcasting stake in another state to see if their wifi happened to still be on and someone was hogging bandwidth. Used CDOL to contact the stake people till I found someone answering their phone in the stake I thought it was only to find it was another stake in the same city so started over. Started over there and finally got the stake patriarch who passed me to someone else who could then hand his phone to the technology specialist over the broadcast. Learned they were having trouble getting the internet signal out and he and Salt Lake were working on it.

So could we set up an audio work around for such situations in the future? If the stake that was broadcasting simply took a cell phone to a quiet room on the chapel sound system so the phone could listen to the sound in the room and if that phone could handle conference calls could we work around by simply having every ward needing connection dial to join a conference call. Then jack the cell phone in the ward into the chapel sound system with the crab box? What else would be needed? If it needed to go to a conference call number to work would having a satellite phone going from the broadcasting stake center to the conference call location help?(I assume if it did church headquarters could have one it loaned out for such events)

We need something because I had 30 people in my building waiting in frustration as sound / picture came & went and I know the problem was stake wide and likely area wide. My stake assuming equivalent turn out would be 120 people affected stake wide and if it got even 10 stakes that would be 1200 people affected(I assume more) Wasting 2 hours of that many peoples time simply isn't kosher and there should be an alternate answer. I know my cell phone jacks into the sound system easily to receive as we learned that much while learning about doing a stake webcast while we were being sure we had alternatives in case the webcast went down. So on a single phone to phone I know it works.

I was at another of the buildings involved in this. We did not get the message to change channels between the broadcast meetings, but I believe that part is a communication (Carbonware) issue.

The buffering was bad and we cut the meeting short and sent people home. It was pretty obviously on the sender end, as all receiving ends behaved the same. Root cause appeared to be bandwidth at sender location. (Was the meetinghouse WiFi turned off?). The internet streaming was also poor quality, so that eliminates the satellite system and puts us at bandwidth, or possibly sender local hardware.

Possible workarounds:
1) failover to audio only on both broadcast and receive ends. This can be implemented in most protocols. I dunno here though.

2) Meraki APs should be able to be shut off from SLC if issues occur? Or QoS them? Perhaps as an option on a schedule when setting up the Broadcast schedule?

3). Audio only option through cell phones can work as well.

I dunno, sometimes carrier pigeons could be a viable option as well.

CURT

During the broadcast I had, our test was flawless, but the actual broadcast was running into trouble. WiFi was off. I did a few things, but I think it was the rebooting of the modem and firewall that fixed it. No problems for the rest of the broadcast.

curt.christoffersen wrote:2) Meraki APs should be able to be shut off from SLC if issues occur? Or QoS them? Perhaps as an option on a schedule when setting up the Broadcast schedule?

Scheduled AP down time is in beta.

curt.christoffersen wrote:3). Audio only option through cell phones can work as well.

Our standard setup for stake conference webcasts includes patching the audio into a conference call. All receiving sites dial in to that call and stay connected the entire meeting. If problems occur with the webcast, they can switch the meetinghouse sound system input to the phone. We maintain a land line in each building for this purpose.