Quality of zoom group call- Particularly "Lagging" visuals.

[johnhb]

I attended a web zoom meeting last night and found the quality of both my output (in a technical sense) and being able to see and hear others was extremely poor!! I have just sat in the exact same spot and did a test- next morning , and hey presto, perfect!!

What might explain the laggy, poor quality last night compared to the prefect quality otherwise experienced- particularly the visuals? Does zoom have to "learn" the settings  in a new meeting? My bandwidth and fiber connections are all top notch- in spite of being distant from the router- so I don't think it's a technical issue at my end. There were about 25 people at what was a local meeting.. but I don't think that should make a difference either?

[Hime-Tama]

Hi John, Hime-Tama here.

Night time is the worst time to be on a zoom meeting, especially between 5pm-9pm, because everyone is home from work and using their internet like their contract ends tomorrow.  I believe your situation can be improved if you tried connecting your computer to the internet via a LAN Cable (AKA an ethernet cable). You can do this by plugging it into a LAN port installed in your wall, or directly into your Internet service provider's modem box/ router that you recieved with your home internet plan. This circumvents the limitations of WiFi and maximizes packet upload and download speed, not limited by the capabilities of the router.  However, there is also another factor that could be affecting it, and that is your CPU and RAM. If your computer is running lots of other processing-intensive programs while you are in your zoom meeting, it's going to get bad, real fast. Everything will lag, not only your other programs but zoom as well, so your video and audio will appear really laggy for other people in the meeting, and so will their video and audio feeds on your end. Zoom is best run on a standalone computer, while work and other programs are run on a different device that is not running the zoom meeting. This makes screensharing from your work computer difficult, but I just used a video capture device to circumvent this.  

Hope this answers your question.

[CorriganReid]

My wife's is laggy frequently, cpu is fine, RAM is fine, internet didn't get much better, 1.5gbps down and 107 upload ping is usually 4-9, my best guess is the university's internet (or the teachers home internet if working from home) OR the number of students in the class, any other troubleshooting ideas? Nothing running in the background, no backdrops or zoom apps at all, even with the network clear and only her connected makes no difference