Does WebRTC chew up lots of bandwidth?

Question

I am considering implementing Freshly Tilled Soil's jq webrtc plugin for a site I am building. Ive tested it and it works quite nicely... my only worry and question is that this will eat up all my clients bandwidth.

So compared to average site visits, does anyone know how webrtc compares?

I KNOW the standard is supposed to use as little bandwidth as possible, but I was hoping to hear from some developers who have used it on their sites.

Answer 1

WebRTC by itself is a peer-to-peer as mentioned by Hartley and with the use of javascript libraries such as peerJS, typically developers do not need a server.

However the client themselves will consume high bandwidth if you are having multiple video chat. For example in a 5 way video chat, each client would have to upload 4 stream to the other peers and download 4 stream from the other peers.