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Comment by tsycho | Hacker News Reader

Having used both Zoom and Meet extensively now for the past 6 months, my experience is:

1/ Your internet connection, especially upload bandwidth and latency matter a lot.

2/ Zoom's desktop app performs very well, but its web version is atrocious. Not just because of the dark patterns they use to force you to install the desktop app, but also its performance is terrible compared to its desktop version, as well as worse than almost everything else. Unfortunately, I don't trust them and refuse to use their desktop app on anything but my iPad.

3/ Meet used to be bad like Zoom on web 6 months ago, but has improved a lot and is slowly approaching Zoom desktop in performance. I have noticed that Meet on my work GSuite calls at work perform much better than on my personal account. This might be explained by #1 above I.e. my family has worse internet connections than my coworkers, but I am not sure if all improvements have been rolled out to personal accounts.

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> 1/ Your internet connection, especially upload bandwidth and latency matter a lot.

I moved to a new house, and the quality of my video calls dropped dramatically. Constant freezing and dropouts. It was extremely frustrating to try to participate in a meeting. I could receive fine, but anytime I spoke out, I would drop out within minutes.

Speed tests showed plenty of bandwidth, but my modem statistics showed high upstream power levels, occasionally out of the allowed range, and lots of "uncorrectable" packets.

I finally got a Comcast technician in to look at it (yay for business-class support), and they replaced the cable from the pole all the way to the first splitter in the basement, and since then it's been flawless. 100/15 Megabit service has been totally adequate for our needs, so long as it's reliable and the latency is low enough.

It kills me that our city isn't putting in conduits or fiber while doing utility work, though. The whole time that was happening, there were gas contractors opening the street and running new supply lines to every house, but not putting in any extra conduits or dark fiber. The construction sounds were almost like being back in the office...

Today I took a flawless webex meeting on a laptop tethered to my mobile phone, that same tether also allowed me to work without issue over rdp or whatever.

My mobile internet is really fucking good, and often outperforms my sodding wired connection

Dial in for voice or use just using T-Mobile 4G was my fallback on bad days. Worked great until I hit my data cap...

I've had great experience with T-Mobile 4G. It outperforms my wired Frontier connection in terms of both up/down speeds. Although it has been getting Spotty lately. During peak hours the speed drops significantly.

>1/ Your internet connection, especially upload bandwidth and latency matter a lot.

It grates me when people claim DSL/cable qualifies as sufficiently good broadband in the US because of the lack of upload bandwidth and slow latency (can add packet loss in here too). The situation is so bad that you can't even find how much upload bandwidth so called "broadband" cable ISPs offer.

The experience on symmetric fiber connections is noticeably improved, and we can have a house with a whole group of people streaming video up and down simultaneously without a hiccup. Such as in times of work from home and school from home.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but not Meet).

For the last item, personal accounts (only?) default to send and receive video at lower resolution (360p). So if you meant that the quality is lower, you can set it on both sides to 720p.

Edit: I don’t think Meet remembers those settings though, so you have to do it every time (and show your family members how to do so).

It doesn't remember them, it is frustrating.

As a legacy free GApps user it is even more confusing because the admin page gives me an option to default to higher quality video but that doesn't do anything.

This is maddening...

Why does Google, with all the resources at its disposal, choose to cheap out like this when competitors in the video chat space (from tiny startups to gigantic corporation of similar size) have offered near native resolution video chat for ages?

Are they even _trying_ to compete?

I used Meet and Zoom in the last weeks.

Meet was much worse than Zoom, even when I take the bad web interface of Zoom into account.

I ain't a fan of either, though.

Meet certanly rolls out improvements for GSuite before public ones. I think there's even a GSuite setting of "release channel" where you can control how early you get these improvements.

> 2

I refuse to install Zoom. They have removed the dark pattern, and the "join via browser" option is almost immediately available. If you have it installed, now is a good time to uninstall it.

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