But bandwidth does matter when you have multiple devices. On a typical day it is not uncommon for multiple video calls to be going on at the same time in my apt. My roommate and I used to schedule our meetings around one another so that we could have a call with our respective advisors that wasn't choppy. We'd also make sure not to be streaming video at these times either. Bandwidth is 100% part of the problem.
Now I agree that there are other issues like stability, latency, and upload, but it is just naive to dismiss download bandwidth.
> On a typical day it is not uncommon for multiple video calls to be going on at the same time in my apt. My roommate and I used to schedule our meetings around one another so that we could have a call with our respective advisors that wasn't choppy. We'd also make sure not to be streaming video at these times either. Bandwidth is 100% part of the problem.
I don't know your situation, but fwiw, if a friend was having this problem and they came to me for help, I would assume it was their wifi network.
Up until a few years ago, I only had 3 down / 1 up in my apartment. My building had FIOS, but it was much more expensive than my absolutely dirt cheap cable connection. The internet was stable and reliable, and Facetime calls went fine. I did live alone, and large downloads were a massive pain, but 3 Mbps is much slower than the speeds we're discussing.
A tip for anyone having such issues with wifi on linux: Is it a 2.4GHz network and is anyone using bluetooth (such as headphones)? They might be interfering with each other.
The iwlwifi kernel module has an option that tries to allow them to coexist, but it seems totally random whether or not you should have it on. Different bluetooth headphones also affect it in different ways (as I discovered a few weeks ago when I bought a different brand; with my usual the bluetooth would drop for about a minute then reconnect with no effect on the wifi, but with the new ones they would go crazy maintaining the connection, causing a lot of audio stuttering and extremely slow wifi).
Yeah, that's not what was happening. It was bandwidth issues over peak usage times. You could run speedtests (to the router) and find this out very quickly. I know you want to assert your original answer as still being correct. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying that there are other important variables here that you are just throwing out. Anyone that has done debugging with network issues knows that there's a thousand things that can go wrong. Yes, there's common problems, but there's a lot of breaking points. Certain ones became more common during the pandemic as we stressed networks in different ways than most people were doing previously.
Now I agree that there are other issues like stability, latency, and upload, but it is just naive to dismiss download bandwidth.