Cisco Cisco WebEx Meeting Center WBS30 White Paper

 

 

© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. 

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Introduction 

The performance of a Cisco WebEx

®

 session depends on many factors. Some of these factors can be 

administratively controlled within the WebEx admin user interface, and the Cisco

®

 Collaboration Cloud, whereas 

others can be managed within the customer’s corporate network or home computing infrastructure. In this paper, 

we provide measurements for the network bandwidth generated during a WebEx session. This document also 

describes Cisco WebEx high-quality, high-definition (HQ and HD) video technology and provides details on how it 

works in the context of your meetings. Finally, this paper also offers information about storage capacity required for 

Network-Based Recording (NBR) functions. This paper does not contain information about the Cisco Jabber

®

 

client. 

Optimized Bandwidth Usage 

Cisco WebEx services optimize bandwidth usage to lower the amount of data transmitted over the network, helping 

to reduce network congestion, increase performance, and improve your experience. The most significant 

optimizations follow. 

The client software monitors text and graphics, and shared document views are transmitted. Incremental changes 

are detected and only these changes are transmitted again, fully optimizing the bandwidth use and preserving the 

user experience. 

All large data transfers and file uploads are compressed, not only reducing network traffic, but also adding a level 

of encryption to the data stream. For more information about Cisco WebEx security, refer to our security white 

paper at 

During application sharing, the contents of the window are dynamically updated. WebEx services incrementally 

update only those portions of the screen that have changed. The updates are transmitted as vector graphics 

commands and not as bitmaps. 

Several video compressions and optimizations have been incorporated into WebEx HQ and HD video. The amount 

of bandwidth produced by video transmission is directly related to the rate of change of captured video images. 

WebEx services can work through all firewalls using the Secure HTTP (HTTPS) protocol. However, WebEx will first 

check if communication can be established using the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). This approach is more 

efficient and reduces network traffic by approximately 10 percent when compared to HTTPS. Security is achieved 

with use of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.0 (Secure Sockets Layer [SSL] 3.0) standard protocol.