[madwolf]

A decent quality stream is not 256 kilobytes per second (1/4 megabyte), as you write. You probably meant 256kilobits, which is only 32 kilobytes. For speech that’s VERY high quality. Teams actually uses either G.722 or SILK codec, which is just 40kbit/s. That’s 5 kilobytes per second.

[gerdesj]

256kbps (yes I was pissed and miss-typed B for b and a few other transgressions) or whatever is sod all these days for throughput, as you well know, so worrying your codecs down to 40kbps means nothing if your jitter buffer is going mad!

Modern home/office internet connections are mostly optimised for throughput but rarely for latency - that's the province of HFT.

You see tales from the kiddies who fixate over "ping" times when trying to optimize their gaming experience. Well that's nice but when on earth do you shoot someone with ICMP?

I can remember calling relos in Australia in the 1970s/80s over old school satellite links from the UK or Germany and it nearly needed radio style conventions.

I've been doing VoIP for quite a while and it is so crap watching people put up with shit sound quality and latency on a Teams/Zoom/etc call as the "new" normal. I wheel out Wireshark and pretend to watch it and then fix up the wifi link or the routing (Teams outside VPN - split tunnelling) or whatever.

[wcoenen]

Tangentially related to the topic of the bandwidth efficiency of Teams: screen sharing in Teams has a very low framerate of about 3 to 4 fps. It is driving me insane, especially when the presenter starts relentlessly scrolling up and down and circling things with the mouse cursor.

I think Microsoft took bandwidth efficiency a bit too far here.