Yeah, hangouts itself is a completely free service. I am not familiar with too many others doing this.
I've heard a couple other stories like ours. One I remember specifically was a company with a 50/50 mix, they did ALL meetings from their own desks on a hangout so that everyone had the same presence, the remote people didn't feel left out, because everyone has to fight for the same one audio track.
As for bandwidth, it hasn't been anything that we've been troubled by. Been using it for nearly 2 years now. The client on the remote machines has some hiccups from time to time and is somewhat of a resource hog. But if you keep it in the background it isn't too bad.
I've heard a couple other stories like ours. One I remember specifically was a company with a 50/50 mix, they did ALL meetings from their own desks on a hangout so that everyone had the same presence, the remote people didn't feel left out, because everyone has to fight for the same one audio track.
As for bandwidth, it hasn't been anything that we've been troubled by. Been using it for nearly 2 years now. The client on the remote machines has some hiccups from time to time and is somewhat of a resource hog. But if you keep it in the background it isn't too bad.