The Video Conferencing Room Guide: What Every Malaysian Business Owner Needs to Know Before Spending a Ringgit

The short answer

What does a video conferencing room need?

Every room, from a four seat huddle space to a forty seat training room, has to meet the same ten requirements. The equipment changes with the room size. The requirements do not.

The camera and the screen are what you see in the brochure. Audio, network and acoustics decide whether the meeting works.

Five questions to answer before you spend a ringgit

Most rooms that disappoint were bought before anyone answered these. Write the answers on one page and give the same page to every supplier you ask to quote.

1. Who uses the room, and how often? A boardroom used twice a month for board meetings has different priorities from a project room booked all day.
2. How many people sit in it, and how far is the farthest seat from the screen? This one measurement decides the display size, the camera lens and the microphone layout.
3. Which platform does the company run on? Microsoft Teams, Zoom or Google Meet, and which platforms your clients invite you to.
4. What will people share? Slides need less screen than spreadsheets, engineering drawings or video.
5. Is this one room or the first of several? If more rooms follow, the first one sets the standard for all of them.

Teams Rooms, Zoom Rooms or Google Meet: which platform?

Choose the platform your staff already use every day. A room system is a dedicated appliance or room computer that runs one platform's room software, joins a meeting with one tap on the table console, and is managed centrally by IT. Most certified room systems can also join the other platforms' meetings as a guest, with fewer features.

Each platform charges a room licence on top of the hardware:

• Microsoft Teams Rooms has a free Basic licence for up to 25 rooms per organisation, with a limited feature set. Teams Rooms Pro lists at US$40 per room per month, billed yearly, and adds remote management and the advanced meeting features.
• Zoom Rooms lists at US$49 per room per month. There is no free tier.
• Google Meet room hardware needs its own per device licence from Google.

These are list prices in US dollars. Local resellers bill in ringgit, so confirm the current figure when you get the quote.

Room system or bring your own device? In a bring your own device (BYOD) room, a laptop connects to the room's video bar by USB and runs the call. It is cheaper and works with any platform, but every meeting depends on someone's laptop, cable and drivers. A room system suits any room that is booked every day. Many rooms do both: a room system for internal meetings, with a BYOD cable at the table for client calls on another platform.

The four room types and what each one needs

Huddle room. The most common mistake here is overbuying. An all in one video bar combines the camera, microphones and loudspeaker in one unit, and it is the right answer for most rooms of this size. Keep the table close to the screen, because a wide angle camera loses detail with distance.

Meeting room. This is where a single video bar reaches its limit. Once the far end of the table sits outside the bar's microphone range, add a table or ceiling microphone rather than a louder bar. A touch console on the table is what makes staff use the room without help.

Boardroom. Long tables, senior users and often a second screen. The layout matters as much as the equipment, so it has its own section below.

Training room. The presenter moves and the audience faces the front, so the camera and microphones have to follow both. See the training room section below.

Boardroom setup: getting the layout right for video

"Boardroom setup" means two things: the seating layout and the AV system. On video they are the same decision, because the layout decides what the camera can see and where the microphones have to reach.

A boardroom that works on video has these in place:

• The camera at the screen end, near seated eye level. Remote participants then look at faces, not at the tops of heads.
• Speaker framing or a second camera on tables for 16 or more. The system switches to whoever is talking, so the far end of the table is not a row of small figures.
• Ceiling microphones or table microphones that cover every seat. Ceiling arrays keep the table clear, but they need about 150 mm of free ceiling void where you want them, which a crowded Malaysian ceiling often does not have. Plan their positions before the ceiling is closed.
• Two displays, or one very large one. People on one screen and content on the other keeps both readable. Beyond 98 inches, an LED wall becomes the option to consider: see our LED wall guide.
• A connection box in the table, with the cable cut-out agreed with the furniture supplier. This item usually belongs to the furniture supplier, and often nobody orders it.
• One touch console that starts the meeting, shares content and adjusts volume.

If your board meetings need chairman priority microphones or a recorded audio record for the minutes, that is a delegate microphone system. It can be linked to the video conferencing system through the audio processor, but plan it as part of the same design.

Training room and classroom setup for video

A training room is the hardest room to get right on video, because the presenter moves, the audience is large, and the people in the room need to hear the presenter as well as the remote participants do.

A training room built for video has a presenter tracking camera at the back of the room that follows whoever is at the front, and a second camera facing the audience so remote participants see who asks a question. The presenter wears a wireless microphone. Ceiling or boundary microphones pick up audience questions. Ceiling loudspeakers reinforce the presenter's voice in the room. Two displays at the front show the remote participants and the content, and a confidence screen at the back lets the presenter see the remote room without turning around.

The Essential tier for a training room of 20 to 40 people costs RM 70,000 to 140,000. A divisible room, two rooms that open into one, adds audio processing capacity, partition sensing and longer commissioning, and starts from RM 150,000.

Audio: the part most companies get wrong

Remote participants will put up with soft video. They will not put up with audio they cannot follow. That is why we recommend 25 to 35 percent of the AV budget for microphones, loudspeakers and audio processing, more than the camera receives.

The room is half the audio system. Two numbers describe it:

• Reverberation time (RT60) is how long a sound takes to die away. For a conference room, 0.4 to 0.6 seconds is the usual target. Glass, plasterboard and bare floors push it higher, and speech starts to blur.
• Background noise is measured on the noise criterion (NC) scale. NC 25 to 30 is the target for conferencing. Ducted fan coil units sit directly above meeting room ceilings in most Malaysian office towers, and they are why so many rooms measure NC-40 or worse. Raise it with the M&E consultant during design. After handover the only remedies are expensive.

What your ceiling does to your audio

Suspended T-bar grid with mineral fibre tiles. The easiest ceiling for AV. Ceiling microphones and loudspeakers drop into a tile position, every device stays serviceable, and the tiles absorb some sound.

Acoustic ceiling tiles. High absorption tiles in the same grid are the cheapest acoustic improvement available if the ceiling is being replaced anyway.

Plasterboard (gypsum board). Hard and reflective. Every microphone and loudspeaker position has to be fixed before the board goes up, and flush mounting adds labour. Moving a device later means cutting and making good.

Exposed ceiling. Popular in newer offices. Microphones and loudspeakers need suspension design, and the room usually needs more absorption on the walls to make up for it.

Glass walls and acoustic panels

The typical Klang Valley meeting room has glass on two or three sides. Glass reflects speech at every frequency that matters, so a glass room needs acoustic treatment that a plasterboard room does not. Treat the solid walls and the ceiling, put soft panels on the wall facing the camera, and add a rug if the floor is hard.

Acoustic treatment typically costs RM 250 to 600 per square metre of treated surface, priced separately from the AV. It delivers four results:

• Speech becomes clearer immediately, for the people in the room and the people on the call.
• Echo drops, so the echo canceller has less to remove and stops clipping the start of sentences.
• The room sounds quieter, which helps a little with privacy. Real speech privacy needs full height walls and door seals.
• The room feels more professional to visiting clients and on camera.

Camera: how to choose it and where to put it

The camera's horizontal field of view decides how much of the room it sees. As a geometry check, a 90 degree lens covers about 4 metres of width at 2 metres from the camera. Huddle rooms, where people sit close, use 120 degree lenses. Long boardroom tables need a narrower lens with zoom, or speaker framing, so the far end is not lost.

• Mount it at the display, at or close to seated eye level. Below the screen suits most rooms. Above the screen suits very large displays.
• Keep windows out of the shot. Glass behind the seats turns people into silhouettes, and west facing facades in the afternoon are the worst case. Fit blinds.
• Light faces from the front. Even lighting from the screen side beats downlights directly over heads, which put shadows under eyes.
• Test from every seat after installation. Check the nearest seat, the farthest seat and both ends of the table, on the platform you actually use.

How big should the screen be?

Size the screen from the farthest seat. A common integrator rule of thumb: for general content such as slides and faces, the farthest seat should be no more than about six times the image height away. For detailed content such as spreadsheets and drawings, no more than about four times. The formal method is the AVIXA DISCAS standard (ANSI/INFOCOMM V202.01), and your integrator should run it for the final design.

When the farthest seat is beyond 7 metres, the choice is two displays, a projector or an LED wall. Two displays also help when content is shared in most meetings: remote faces on one screen and content on the other.

Network, power and the building

What does a video conferencing room cost in Malaysia?

Figures exclude SST. Installation and cabling are priced after the site assessment, because the ceiling, the cable routes and the room conditions decide how much labour the job needs.

Every room size, all three tiers and what each tier contains are in our full video conferencing cost guide.

How to set up a video conference room, step by step

1. Write a one page brief

   Who uses the room, how many seats, the farthest seat distance, the platform, what is shared, how many rooms follow, and the deadline.

2. Get a site survey

   Measure the room. Check the ceiling type and void, glass, air conditioning noise, network points and power.

3. Ask for a design and an itemised quote

   Drawings, a full equipment list, and a list of what is excluded.

4. Coordinate builder's works with the fit out

   Containment, back boxes, wall backing, the table cut-out and network ports, all agreed before the ceiling closes.

5. Order long lead items first

   LED, very large panels and audio processors.

6. Install and commission

   Tune the echo canceller and audio to the room, set the camera framing, and make test calls from every seat on every platform the room will use.

7. Train users and hand over

   A one page guide on the table, admin access for IT, and a named support contact.

If you have more than one room, standardise

When every room starts a meeting the same way, staff stop needing help. Use the same platform, the same touch console layout and the same join process in every room. The hardware can differ, a video bar in the huddle rooms and a modular system in the boardroom, as long as the experience looks the same. Standard rooms are also cheaper to support, because one set of spares and one management portal covers all of them, and they qualify for better volume pricing.

How to choose a video conferencing supplier in Malaysia

Two quotes for the same room can differ by tens of thousands of ringgit, usually because one includes things the other leaves out. Ask every supplier for the same items:

• Proof they are an authorised partner of the brands they quote, so the warranty is honoured locally and firmware support is available.
• A site survey before the price.
• An itemised quote with exclusions listed: acoustic treatment, builder's works, network points, furniture changes and after hours work.
• Commissioning described in writing: audio tuning and test calls, not only installation.
• Support terms after handover: response time, spares, and who applies platform updates.
• References for rooms like yours.

Three questions separate an integrator from a box seller. Who tunes the echo canceller in this room? What happens when the platform pushes an update that breaks the room? Which items are you not quoting?

Seven mistakes that waste the budget

1. Buying on price alone. Grey imports with the wrong plug and no local warranty cost less until the first fault, then cost more.
2. Treating every room the same. A huddle room and a boardroom need different equipment, even if they share a console layout.
3. Ignoring acoustics until after handover. Fixing echo after the walls are finished costs more than designing for it.
4. Forgetting the remote participants. A room designed only for the people in it sounds poor on the other end of the call.
5. Bringing in the AV contractor after the ceiling is closed. Every late microphone position or cable route becomes a variation order.
6. One network point and the office Wi-Fi. Room systems need wired, stable connections.
7. No support or refresh plan. Budget the replacement in year one, so year five is a routine purchase rather than a crisis.