Does anyone know why video conferencing is so poor now? Even on 30mbit/10mbit connections on both ends, we still get drops and lags a few times per 20 min call on both skype and google voice. It seems like latency is the real issue, though larger uplinks on your average person's connection will surely help some too.

When you stream a movie in HD, it buffers up about 30 seconds worth of data, so if the connection slows down, you won't notice.

When doing a live video conference, you can only have about a 1 to 2 second buffer before the connection becomes unusably laggy.

1-2 seconds? Hardly - Humans start noticing at about a tenth of a second in lag, and it's unusable at beyond a half second. When you're videoconferencing, all of your latency is eaten by the speed of light - You've got no time for buffering, you've barely got time for pre- and post-processing.