Common Video Conferencing Problems
Video meetings fall apart in the same handful of ways: blurry picture, sound arriving late, someone vanishing entirely. Behind nearly all of it sits one overloaded internet connection: other devices in the house eating the capacity, a weak wireless signal, or brief gaps where data never arrives, which you notice as freezing.
Speedify is an app that uses Wi-Fi, 4G/5G cellular, Ethernet, Starlink and satellite internet connections all at once rather than just one. Speedify can only keep you online through a drop when it has two or more internet connections to work with, for example Wi-Fi plus your phone’s 4G/5G cellular. On a single connection, Speedify works as an encrypted VPN and cannot stop that connection from dropping. When one connection drops, Speedify moves the call to the other in milliseconds and keeps the same public IP address, so the calling app does not see a new address. The sections that follow match each symptom to its cause and show what using Speedify prevents on Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls.
The same connection problems show up in three places:
- when being part of video conferences on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Google Classroom, etc.
- when watching your favorite movies, TV shows and clips on Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Twitch, etc.
- when broadcasting yourself (live streaming) on Twitch, Facebook Live or YouTube
Causes for Video Conferencing Issues
As mentioned above, video conferencing problems are usually caused by an Internet connectivity glitch or a sub-par connection. Of course, issues on the platform side (Netflix, Twitch, YouTube, Zoom, etc.) can happen, but the probability of that is much lower than you having issues with your Internet connection.
Video calls break up when:
- Other apps are hogging the Internet bandwidth. At some point there might not be enough left to send and receive the audio and video network packets needed for smooth streaming.
- You have a slow Internet connection. Some Internet connections just aren’t fast enough to allow high quality video streaming.
- There is high packet loss. Internet connections are dropping network packets, so your streaming video misses parts of the audio or video. This usually happens at the edge of the range on wireless connections like Wi-Fi and cellular.
- You’re moving while using the Internet (riding on trains and buses, for example). That’s because the coverage varies as you travel through hills and tunnels and bridges.
Bottom line: a video call needs a connection that does not pause, and one internet connection on its own often cannot promise that. Speedify is built for that, as the next sections show.
How to Troubleshoot Video Conferencing Problems
First, make sure the problem is not on the platform’s side (Zoom, Google Meet / Classroom, Microsoft Teams, etc.). Check the platform’s status page and its social media accounts for news about an outage.
Next, you should check your ISP’s status page / social media for any reported outages. And test your Internet speed so you know you’re getting what you’re paying for.
If you want to go ahead and troubleshoot your issue, you can follow this article here. But if you want to address your video conferencing issues quickly, just use Speedify directly on your computer or mobile device.
Speedify Helps You Avoid Video Conferencing Issues in the First Place
Speedify uses packet-level technology to let you combine 2 or more Internet connections at the same time. Speedify automatically detects audio and video streams. By watching the flow of packets, Speedify can determine:
- how much bandwidth is needed for a specific streaming video, and
- whether or not you’re getting the capacity it requires.
Once Speedify has identified the streams, it does several things for them:
- Maintains Quality of Service (QoS) to make sure they get the connectivity they need versus other services. Speedify prioritizes video streaming traffic over other types of web traffic. Things like web browsing, backups and software updates won’t mess up your calls and live streams.
- Combines connections for faster Internet speed. Speedify can split single video streams across multiple available Internet connections. It can send some packets on Wi-Fi, some on cellular and some on a wired Ethernet connection, if available. Speedify also reassembles these packets so the app just sees a faster Internet connection. By moving network packets through all available connections on a computer, smartphone, tablet or other supported device, Speedify can get up to 95% of the speed of the combined connections.
- Minimizes packet loss using redundancy. If your Internet connections are dropping network packets, Speedify can detect this and start sending the packets redundantly, on all available internet connections at the same time. Speedify only delivers whichever copy gets through first, which gives your call the reliability of all your connections and the lowest latency of any of them. That way Speedify helps your call survive network dropouts and makes sure more of your audio and video gets through when one connection struggles.
So, if you’re experiencing video conferencing issues, use Speedify with a second internet connection for faster, more stable and secure connectivity.
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