iVisit is designed to be highly sensitive to the impact it may have on the other users and applications sharing the network. Unlike other real time audio/video applications that may blast away at whatever data rate you select, iVisit continually monitors network performance, and adjusts it's transmission rate accordingly.

The power of iVisit's network friendly; peer-to-peer architecture becomes apparent when you are receiving, say, 5 audio/video streams from 5 independent sources. Those streams must settle on some fair sharing of the available bandwidth. Rather than developing explicit control protocols by which these streams might notify each other and negotiate appropriate rates, iVisit streams competing for bandwidth become aware of each other in exactly the same way they become aware of other network traffic: by colliding in the network and responding accordingly.

Appropriate rate adjustments reduce iVisit packet loss, allowing for a higher degree of data compression. This improves the multi party communication experience. As an important side effect, it allows iVisit streams to coexist more efficiently with other network traffic.

Although you may not plan to videoconference while downloading large files, iVisit is a more dependable tool since it enables you to take a video call when you're using the network for something else.

This is not an easy problem to solve, and explains why, after many years, iVisit remains the only peer-to-peer multi-party videoconferencing application that actually works in a wide range of real world conditions.

As a simple experiment for comparison, try simultaneously viewing 5 streaming video pages on the web. Even though each of these streams are coming from powerful servers on high bandwidth connections, some of them will stutter and freeze. Now call 5 friends (or strangers in the iVisit public directory) and see that even though iVisit streams typically originate from desktop machines on the edge of the network, the video in all of the windows is smooth and clear.

iVisit audio and video transport is built on the faster and more efficient UDP protocol. The peer to peer architecture does mean no server overhead and hi-bandwidth costs. The bandwidth requirements for each client are based on the camera, lighting, movement and size of the video window and range as follows:

Window	Size	Outgoing Bandwidth
Small	160 x 120	50-120 kbps
Medium	320 x 240	150 – 240 kbps
Large	640 x 480	400 kbps

iVisit can easily host 4-5 user conferences over broadband Internet connections (typical 700kbps upstream capacity). To increase the user counts users can disable the video or connect through external conferencing solutions. New fiber optic offerings by Verizon and similar carriers will increase the meeting size dramatically. Local area networks operating at 100 Mbps can easily host 16 people meetings.

The iVisit client and server will not allow any communication without strong authentication. The authentication scheme is based on Kerberos-like tickets, using AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption. This is unlike email, which makes it very easy for a sender to masquerade as another user.

iVisit audio, video and live chat is carried directly from peer-to-peer, and is not currently encrypted. So, anyone who is able to eavesdrop on the network between you and the other parties you are connected to could potentially eavesdrop on your communications. However, this is more secure than e-mail, because all e-mail passes through an e-mail server, and is stored there for a period of time. This makes an e-mail server a very attractive target for a hacker. If they can install an eavesdropper near the e-mail server, or gain logon access to it, they have immediate access to a large amount of communication of many people. iVisit will soon release 128 bit AES encrypted audio/video and collaboration formats.