“You are breaking up ..”

We’ve all had that experience. The appointment for the online meeting was made well advance, you’ve had the necessary comfort break, your coffee is by your side, you think you’ve got a great network connection, the online meeting starts .. and someone says “You’re breaking up..”.

“Can you hear me ok? You are breaking up.”

“Ye__ … _ _an hea_ _ou __st fine!”, and the picture looks like it’s been pushed through a Minecraft filter.

I remember the days of dial-up when I was in university. If you were lucky you had a 56k connection. The university had what was called, if i remember correctly, a “T1” connection. Meaning it was “trunk connection” with a 1Mb connection speed. This was blisteringly fast. A webpage would render in under 30 seconds!

These days, many of us have great access to the internet with download speeds which were unheard of ‘back in the day’. If we use a speedtest tool (below) and we get a measly 1Mb, we maybe feeling like the world is ending. #firstWorldProblems. Am I right?

Check your bandwidth

Bandwidth is a term which basically means, “how much stuff you can squeeze down a pipe.”. This can be your own brain or, in this case, a data connection.

Generally when we talk about bandwidth, we might think of how fast stuff arrives to our phone or computer; our connections download speed. We often neglect to think about the upload speed. A decent download speed over of healthy connection is important for the quality of the incoming video, but it’s the speed and quality of of the upload connection which affects quality of the video leaving your computer – i.e. how your video looks and sounds to others.

Here’s a quick look at how much bandwidth various online conferencing apps might need.

	Microsoft Teams	Google Meet	Skype
Video call (HD)	1,5 – 4 Mbs	3,6 Mbs	1,5 Mbs
Screen sharing (HD)	1,5 – 4 Mbs	4,9 – 6,1 Mbs (Video call + 1,3 – 2,5 Mbs)	1,5 Mbs
Voice call	10 – 76 Kbs	100 Kbs	100 Kbs

How fast.com am I?

In the example below using Fast.com, taken on a train in Finland as I was writing this, only the download speed of 15 Mbps is initially shown. By clicking on the [ Show more ] button, we see my upload speed is 19 Mbps.

Normally we see around a 10:1 ratio between the download and upload speeds. In this case they are both more less equal, and both are well in excess of the minimum requirements for a good video call experience.

Too many tabs open?

Whilst we often look to a poor network connection as the root of our online meeting woes, there other factors which can adversely affect the quality of our call.

Our computers and mobile devices are wonders of the modern age, they still have a long way before having infinite resources. Getting data from your microphone and webcam, and squirting it down the internet, whilst at the same time converting the incoming data stream into something which can be presented to you as smooth video with great sound; this takes some complicated maths. This often happens seamlessly in the background, so we take it for granted.

Are you “one of those folks” who has a lot going on in their computer? Several browser windows full of tabs open, word processor and spreadsheet files running, music playing, and maybe a movie downloading? No wonder that your computer is feeling the strain, and sometimes we find ourselves crying, “You are breaking up!”.

If you have used one of the speedtest tools below, and are getting at least 5 Mbs in both download and upload, then the next thing to check is our computer’s resources.

A quick and easy solution is to simply close any programs which you aren’t using. Start with those which are actively using your internet connection.

• File sync clients (OneDrive, iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox ..)
• Music and video streaming apps (Netflix, Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Twitch ..)
• Browers tabs, and even the window themselves.
  • These tabs can be found, and reopened easily from your browser history. 🙂

You’d be amazed at the amount of resources consumed by browser tabs!

Resource managers

Computer operating systems are pretty good at invisibly managing the resources. Even so, sometimes it’s good to look at what is going on under the hood ourselves.

Windows

I find the easiest way to start to the Task Manager in Windows 11 is to press Ctrl+Shift+Escape together on your keyboard.

HowToGeek.com has a comprehensive article on this here: https://www.howtogeek.com/741092/how-to-launch-task-manager-in-windows-11/

MacOs

“Activity monitor” on Apple computers works in a similar way. Open it by pressing “CMD + Shift + U” simultaneously to open the Utilities folder, and from there open the Activity monitor application.

Using the resource manager, or task manager, you can quickly see if there is an application or process which is hogging resources such as the memory, network connection, or hard disk. If your computer is behaving sluggishly, you might notice an application as having a high CPU usage. This would be indicated by the value being highlight by a dark blue or even red colour.

If you don’t need this app during your call, you can try closing it and seeing what difference it makes.

By following the tips in this article, you can now hopefully avoid hearing that dreaded phrase, “You are breaking up!”.

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