I had the chance to tests the beta version of iChat A/V, the latest audio and video conferencing tool from Apple. Since I don’t have a camera, I’ve only been able to use the audio conferencing with some friends.

iChat is very friendly to use and the audio chatting works quite well actually. But I don’t think video conferencing will be useable on today DSL lines as Steve Jobs like to think. Why not? Simply because video and audio conferencing use the upload line and not the download line.

For a today DSL line, the upload bandwith is only 16kb/s, only twice as fast as a modem. Unless Apple engineers finds a new MPEG compression algorithm we should all wait for faster personal DSL lines.