Viber call quality poor how to#
Viber call quality poor software#
Viber call quality poor professional#
Viber call quality poor download#

This is what causes the dreaded “sorry, you cut out for a minute-can you repeat that?”Įxtreme jitter or packet loss are most often caused by a network link failing. This is called packet loss, but from the point of view of video calls, it usually has a similar effect to extreme jitter, in that it will cause the video/audio to cut out for a little while, and possibly to skip over some audio when it resumes. Sometimes packets of data can be not just delayed, but lost entirely. That 500 millisecond buffer will show up as lag.

Viber call quality poor software#

If your video call software observes that every tenth packet takes an extra 500 milliseconds to arrive, it will leave a 500 millisecond “buffer” between when it receives a normal packet and when it displays the data, so that when the 10th packet is delayed, it won’t need to stop the stream. For calls, it’s important for latency to be low not just on average, but consistently, because audio/video lag is determined by the latency of the slowest packet in the stream.

With high enough latency, it can be really hard to have a fluent conversation, because every single silence feels awkwardly long and triggers your conversational instinct to fill it with chatter.Įven if it’s not noticeable, though, latency is one of the things that contributes to video calls feeling “off,” because everyone’s reactions to what you’re saying are delayed by a few beats.

High latency manifests as lag, where it takes your friend a while to start talking after you stop, because the audio took a while to come out of their speaker. Latency, the time it takes to send one “packet” of data across the link. It’s important that your bandwidth is enough to transmit video and audio at the quality level you want (and to accommodate any other simultaneous users of your network), but beyond that, extra bandwidth won’t help. Streaming a standard definition video already requires 3 Mbps.

Viber call quality poor download#

Most internet plans that aren’t dialup or low-end DSL will support this.įor instance, Zoom needs only 600 kbps of upload and download bandwidth for “high quality” 1:1 video, and tops out at 1.8 Mbps (megabits per second). Bandwidth is divided into upload (sending data from your computer to the Internet) and download (the other direction).ĭespite marketing and much of the Internet’s advice, bandwidth is probably not the thing making your video calls suck, unless you’re on a bad phone connection or someone else on your network is streaming video or something. When analyzing the quality of a network link, you care about three things:īandwidth, the rate at which data can be sent to the person you’re talking to.

If you’ve solved your own network problems but the person you’re talking to hasn’t, just send them a link to this post :) When you video call a friend, the data (audio and video) are sent from you to your friend over many different network links between different devices:Īny one of these links can have a problem, although you will mainly care about the ones on your side (the top half of the diagram) because they’re the ones under your control.

Viber call quality poor professional#

I’m not a professional network technician, just someone who’s used a lot of bad networks and occasionally fixed them. In this guide I’ll aim higher: I’d like to not just give you troubleshooting steps, but explain what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.Įpistemic status: the best way to get the right answer on the internet is to post the wrong answer.

Viber call quality poor how to#

There are many network troubleshooting guides out there, but most of them regurgitate a random sequence of “try this” without explaining why, or even showing you how to see if it worked. The most frequent culprit is a bad internet connection, so in this post I’ll go over how to troubleshoot and fix that (in the ways that matter most for video calls). Unfortunately, because humans are terrible at making technology that just works, there are many ways to ruin your video calls unnecessarily. A lot of people have recently started doing most of their work via video calls instead of in-person meetings.