Summary
On paper, I have the ideal setup for taking video calls: an excellent internet connection, a Wi-Fi router that’s close to my laptop, and a dedicated mic, so everyone can clearly hear me say “Am I audible?” twenty times before I get to the point. In practice, however, my video calls were taking way longer than intended, and I could sense the mild annoyance of everyone else on the call when I asked them to repeat themselves for the umpteenth time. This was all thanks to the constant stuttering, audio-video sync issues, and random drops I was facing while video calling. The usual stuff like restarting my router, disconnecting other devices from my Wi-Fi network, and closing any bandwidth-heavy apps didn’t help me one bit. Maybe there was something in my Wi-Fi adapter settings that could fix the jitter and packet loss during calls? You’d be right to think so. The network metrics that actually matter for video calls Don’t blame your internet speed Running a speed test won’t tell you much about why you’re experiencing freezes, stutters, and synchronization issues during video calls. You could have triple-digit Mbps speeds and still have issues while video calling, as was the case for me. Jitter and packet loss play a bigger role here. And the lower these values, the better. Network latency, sometimes used interchangeably with ‘ping,’ tells you how long it takes for a data packet to reach its destination from its source, and vice versa. When latency fluctuates a lot, you have high jitter on your network. Packet loss is what percentage of data packets were dropped before reaching their destination. Ideally, this should be under 2% for video calls. A simple way to check your network’s jitter and packet loss is to open Command Prompt, type in ping google.com -n 25 , and press Enter. This command will ping google.com twenty-five times. Look at the values next to time, and see if they vary wildly: maybe the value is 25ms once, then goes to 150ms the next second, and then back to something like 10ms. If that’s the case, your network is dealing with high jitter, and it’s something that video calls are particularly sensitive to. Additionally, Google Meet, Zoom, and Teams all have options that show you how stable your network connection is during a call. My latency and jitter was actually not that bad when pinging Google. However, the Zoom statistics page displayed a packet loss of 8.3%, and a jitter of 74ms. How I changed each Wi-Fi adapter setting And which ones actually helped Your Wi-Fi adapter’s settings can be accessed by right-clicking your Wi-Fi adapter under the Network adapters section in the Device Manager, then selecting Properties > Advanced. Now, there are a bunch of settings here, and some of them should be left at their default values because, at best they won’t make a difference, and at worst, will make things worse than before. These include forcing particular wireless modes using 802.11a/b/g, and 802.11n/ac/ax Wireless Mode settings, the two Wake on… settings, and Packet Coalescing. The ones that actually made a difference for me were:
- Preferred Band: This setting decides which Wi-Fi band—5GHz, or 2.4GHz—your device will prefer. I set this to Prefer 5GHz band because it is usually less crowded than a 2.4GHz band. However, the 2.4GHz band has higher coverage and better penetration through walls. It worked for me because my laptop no longer switches between to the 2.4GHz band when I’m close enough for a strong 5GHz signal.
- Channel Width: The best way to describe this setting is to use an analogy. Think of a road: a wider road lets more traffic pass through, but any single car is susceptible to interference from both sides, whereas a narrow road lets a slower, steady stream of traffic pass through, but a single car is less susceptible to interference. The road is the channel in question here. I set this to 20MHz only for the 2.4GHz band, which made a noticeable difference when I had to take video calls from my study, which is a bit further away from my router. Yes, the speed took a hit, but it didn’t really make a difference because video calls only need a few Mbps of speed.
- Roaming Aggressiveness: This is the setting which decides how eagerly your device looks for and switches between wireless access points. I set this to Lowest, which meant my laptop would only scan for other access points when the current one’s signal was too weak, instead of always being on the lookout for one. This directly translated to a more stable connection. However, you might want to stick to the default value of Medium, if you have multiple routers in your home, and would prefer your device switched to the one with the strongest signal when moving across areas. There may be other culprits behind high jitter Changing my Wi-Fi adapter’s settings wouldn’t have made much of a difference if I didn’t have the basics in place first. This meant being in the same room as my Wi-Fi router, pausing heavy downloads and streaming, enabling Quality of Service (QoS) in my router settings, and switching off power-saving features. It’s also a good idea to switch off bandwidth-hogging features like Delivery Optimization on Windows.