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Comment by ritchiea | Hacker News Reader

Here in Berlin my DSL connection has been awful since the social distancing began. And many of my friends have complained of similar problems. Frequent disconnections, broken up zoom calls. Though ironically the streaming has been fine from both Netflix & Amazon.

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I've had disconnected Zoom calls here (Netherlands) as well, but it seems that's just Zoom not being able to handle the traffic because Google Hangouts and MS Teams are both fine. And Netflix and Disney+ are also working fine.

Didn't MS Teams already go down once due to the additional traffic in Europe?

It could be that they don't have local edge servers in the Netherlands, we are using Zoom very heavily here in the UK and its working well with our colleagues here and in the US but some European countries including Netherlands are breaking up or disconnecting. I think Zoom are using AWS.

If streaming works, but zoom doesn't, maybe the issue is with the zoom servers?

I’ve had other disconnections and sporadic complete DSL outages during the day. It might be there’s more traffic during the day when people are performing work duties from home.

Netflix might also be good enough at queuing up downloaded portions of the film ahead of time that the brief outages don’t affect the viewing experience.

Rather the differences between protocols employed. Streaming video can be sent in chunks where latency doesn't matter that much (within certain tolerances, of course.) Realtime voice and video doesn't have that.

What ISP? Maybe they have bad peering because they use peering as a revenue source (cough Telekom).

I think Zoom has been having some issues. In Ireland, I haven't seen any actual Zoom breakages, but the maximum resolution I'm now seeing is 640x360. A week ago if someone had a decent webcam it would do 1080p.

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