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I recently moved to Nairobi, Kenya (from San Francisco).
I have daily standups with people back in SF, and I'm having peculiar downstream issues with SOME audio/videoconferencing solutions. Specifically:
Skype, VSee, WebEx work fine
Google Hangouts, ScreenHero, Sqwiggle have fine outgoing audio, but unusably choppy incoming audio
To clarify, with hangouts/SH/sqwiggle, other users can see and hear me just fine. But I get only very occasional (once every 2-3 secs or so) tiny blips of audio, and similar (~0.25fps) framerates on video. Disabling video doesn't help.
Any thoughts on what could be causing this? My first thought was a closed UDP port, but the "Chrome Connectivity Diagnostics" tool suggests hangouts can access all required ports. No port blocking at all on my router/machine.
Connection is 12Mbps down/2.5Mbps up...which makes the good upstream all the more baffling. Any thoughts appreciated - I'm very eager to get hangouts working smoothly.
unclaimedbaggage
Posted 2014-12-04T18:48:23.457
Reputation: 845
3I am pretty sure Microsoft has servers in your part of the world. That would explain the difference. Google might not have servers in your part of the world. You can have the fastest internet service possible, if the only server you can connect is on dialup, you would only be able to transmit at the fastest speeds the server supports. – Ramhound – 2014-12-04T19:37:37.520
1ISP is prioritising some data types/sources but not others? [just a guess, Ramhound may be closer to correct] – Tetsujin – 2014-12-04T19:44:18.327
Thanks folks. I can't find any info on server locations. Google usually pretty good with that sort of thing, but it makes the most sense. Prioritizing data also a possibility, but I've just checked torrenting & it seems to run quickly - I'd expect torrent ports to be at the bottom of the pecking order if ISP were prioritizing. – unclaimedbaggage – 2014-12-04T20:45:03.187