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Comment by shortcake27 | Hacker News Reader

My issue with every piece of commercial software I’ve used is the lag. Slack, Google Meet, Zoom… All have noticeable delay which make conversation unnatural and painful.

I’ve been using FaceTime Audio to communicate with family on the other side of the world and it’s incredible. Zero latency and great audio quality. It’s an extremely underrated piece of tech. Not sure about FaceTime video as I’ve never used it, but I bet it’s equally impressive.

Amazing that no one else was able to solve this problem considering the demand for such software during the pandemic. Not my area of expertise, but I assume it must be quite difficult.

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I can't speak for FaceTime, but I've found much better success with all of these platforms if everyone in the meeting is wearing headphones. A lot of the latency is from echo cancellation, and that turns off if there's no echo.

At my last company, I let everyone on my team expense comfortable headphones with a boom mic, and it made a huge difference on Google Meet. I've found Zoom to be similar. I can't speak to Slack's latency issues.

I'm also a big fan of Tuple[0] (the pair coding app) for extremely low latency screen sharing / pair coding and that was a huge advantage too.

[0] https://www.tuple.app

I may be wrong but I believe Bluetooth also adds significant latency. So wired headphones should improve that.

Are you using a VPN for work? It's possible that the network bandwidth is not decent enough to allow for lag free video conferencing.

When Zoom has issues system-wide, we get lag, but I'd say 98% of the time, there's no perceptible latency or bad audio quality.

I’ve used these tools on all sorts of network configurations and there’s always lag.

One thing I will say is that this was all within Australia. Surely the packets aren’t going overseas, but perhaps whatever servers they use in AU just aren’t optimised for ultra low latency.

Lag is one of the issues I've never had with any of those services. I think they all have their CDNs built up enough so thats not a real problem for the vast majority of people.

I agree totally. It makes having conversation between multiple people very awkward with many pauses, then suddenly people all talking over each other, then again awkward pauses. It feels like online meetings are way more "centralized" in the sense that only a couple of people speak, and most other people remain silent. There are other technical problems to video conferencing, but lag is one of the biggest.

I find FaceTime terrible. Takes 10 seconds or more to connect.

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