Bitrate drop in multi video chat

We've been using iChat for 3-way inter-office video chat for about a year. In the last three months or so, we've noticed a drop in video quality. The bitrate (shown in the Connection Doctor) drops from about 500kbps to 100kpbs or less as soon as we add the third office to a chat.
So, I ran some tests. I got 2 MacBook Pros and 1 iMac, all running 10.5.1, all less than a year old. I hooked them up via cable to the same LAN (AirPort Extreme routing). With any combination of 2 computers, I got bitrates between 1500 and 2300 kbps. As soon as a third machine was added, the host machine's bitrate dropped to 200kpbs or less. The other machines would drop, but only to about 500 to 1500 kpbs. The Network Activity monitor confirmed the Connection Doctor's bitrates. CPU loads were <40% the whole time. The same thing was observered whichever machine hosted the video chat.
I understand that resolution will drop when you go from 2-way to 3 or 4-way video chat, probably from a max of 640x480 to 320x240. But this is a much worse drop.
Has anyone else seen this? I'm wondering if Leopard, or one of the recent Quicktime patches, broke the multi-way video chat, since I don't think it was this bad before. Three current machines on a LAN shouldn't see a bitrate drop.
Any help would be appreciated.

iChat 4 pushes Video to the Graphics card rather that the Processor and any RAM you have.
Close each ichat
Copy and Paste the bold text below in every Terminal and hit enter
/Applications/iChat.app/Contents/MacOS/iChat -errorLogLevel 7
(you could do one computer at a time but that would mean more repeats)
This will in fact launch iChat and create a log of doing so.
The log will continue as you start a Chat.
This may highlight if one Graphics card is of lower spec and slowing the thing down.
The Log will be very very long.
Quit iChat before Terminal.
Save the log(s) somewhere like TextEdit
Spend some time going through them to identify when the Video chat started and when the third person was added.
9:37 PM Tuesday; February 12, 2008

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Hello Youseph
Welcome to Apple Discussions.
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Thanks for working with me Ryan.
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Power Mac G5 Mac OS X (10.4.3)
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Message was edited by: mmouse

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Bitrate drop in multi video chat

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