Reassurance on our continued use of Zoom

01 Sep 2020

Addressing concerns raised about use of Zoom in China, and our introduction of Microsoft Teams

We understand a small number of colleagues have raised concerns around the availability and use of Zoom in China for teaching. In addition, the availability of Zoom going forwards for UoM has been raised, so we are keen to clarify the situation as we now know it.

Zoom to continue

Despite the recent roll out of MS Teams across the University, we are keen to reassure users of Zoom that the University has committed to Zoom’s availability going forwards as a business-critical tool. 

Concerns about use of Zoom in China

China is the second highest user base for the UoM Zoom license and there are sometimes hundreds of meetings per day involving hosts and participants in mainland China without issue. However, there have been a small number of reports of some users experiencing connection difficulties.

We have been liaising with Zoom about these reports and a new feature has been enabled as a result. Going forward, users in China who are experiencing any connection issues will be able to choose to allow traffic to be routed through local Chinese data centres which should improve stability. China and Singapore may not be selected by default, but can now be manually selected.

There have also been some questions around Zoom’s vendor model in China and whilst this may be changing slightly moving forward, we have been reassured that connectivity in China isn’t changing. Users in China that wish to purchase Zoom will not be able to do so with a mainland China billing address. Instead they will have to switch to a white label Zoom partner in order to continue to use the service.

We believe that some of the connectivity issues that have been experienced, along with some of the misunderstandings of the changing vendor model has led some colleagues to believe that Zoom would no longer be available for students and colleagues based in China. We’d like to assure you that this absolutely is not the case.

Contact

If you become aware of issues with connections in China (or elsewhere), please provide the Media Services Team with details such as the affected host/participant’s email address or preferably the meeting ID, and they will endeavour to help. They can also set up test meetings to assist with any issues you may be experiencing.

Trevor Byrne, Head of Media Services, and Danielle George, Associate Vice President (Blended and Flexible Learning)