So last Saturday during the "My ESL Friends" discussion group on WIZIQ we tried screen sharing again. We still had problems but fortunately Sid (Mr Spock) came to the rescue. We deliberately tried to use the screen sharing appropriately but I had given microphone to all parties (about 8 of 12 or so in attendance) thinking that that had no import due to their mic's being muted. Here is Sid's comments and warnings:
George,
I know that you like to get everyone involved in the classroom by passing the audio and video controls to everyone, but that increases the bandwidth requirement at users end. Rather than asking the attendees to mute the microphone, it is recommended to give them control only when they are ready to speak. The screen sharing requires that latency at users end be minimal so that everyone can see it happening in sync. If you are going to use screen sharing, then it is recommended to take back controls from user and only give it to those who will be using them.
Following are latency figures from this class:
UserMaximum Latency
Grace 135 seconds
mamun_khan 24.9 seconds
Zachary_Fan 24 seconds
Benjamin_Stewart 18.7 seconds
Sia_S 17.2 seconds
Marian_Heddesheimer12.3 seconds
A_Momen_Adas 9.65 seconds
Elena_R 9.64 seconds
ashwani9029_Mishra 7.98 seconds
Rohit 6.29 seconds
Anurag_Tewari4.53 seconds
youssef 3.97 seconds
Nikki_Elaine 3.56 seconds
U_K_Wasanthi_Kumari2.17 seconds
Jamie_Roberts 1.56 seconds
Muriel_Raes 1.29 seconds
Regards,
Sid
We also did some additional testing with our group using speedtest.net

Hoping to further troubleshoot and anticipate any problems we also talked about using pingtest.net (see slide above) assuming that a ping to an Indian (Mumbai) server would give another indicator. Sid later infromed me that all of their (wiziq) servers are in the USA, so I guess my ping theory doesn't hold up.
I am slowly coming back to the old KISS addage: "Keep It Simple Stupid"
I am just too excited with all of these great toys Uncle Harman sends our way. Fortunately I don't have to admit that I didn't read the instructions first as it seems we were meant to play hard with them and find our own limits.