250 is company, 500 is a crowd: Google Meet doubles call participant limit

For Workspace users who have a Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, or Education Plus license, Google is now rolling out the ability to invite up to 500 concurrent call participants to a Google Meet session. Allowing five hundred people to join is enough to host a virtual concert (or a boring digital lunch room TPS reports meeting).

Believe it or not, you can already live stream your call for up to 100,000 participants at once if it’s mostly unidirectional and requires little to no interaction on their behalf, but until now, you weren’t able to have 500 employees or students at the same time in an interactive call. With this limit increased, you can still create breakout rooms, let individuals take turns speaking, and allow for higher quality and more collaborative sessions. The previous limit for active call participants on Enterprise accounts was 250.

Luckily, this feature is rolling out to the aforementioned Workspace tiers across both Rapid release and Scheduled release domains immediately! You’ll automatically have your limit increased over the next few days, and for some, it’s already been implemented. There’s also nothing that Admins need to do in their console to increase the limit – just enjoy!

Google hopes that by increasing meeting sizes, you and your organization will be able to connect and collaborate more effectively with your colleagues, clients, and customers, and I’m inclined to agree. More doesn’t always mean better, and there is a level of chaos that can break out with this many people at once, but ultimately, it’s a useful update that will let larger companies and movements meet and work through important tasks face to face. Besides, with Meet’s new audio and video locks which keep disruptive participants at bay, the crowd will be much easier to manage!

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