Understanding Your Network

How networks work

When you make a video call on Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet, your voice and video are broken into tiny pieces called packets. These packets travel from your device through your WiFi, router, internet provider, and across the internet to reach everyone else on the call—then the same journey happens in reverse for their audio and video to reach you.

This round trip happens continuously, dozens of times per second. For a smooth call, packets need to arrive quickly, consistently, and completely. When any part of this chain struggles, you experience the all-too-familiar symptoms: frozen faces, choppy audio, "Can you hear me now?"

Why video calls are so demanding

Unlike loading a webpage or downloading a file, video calls are real-time. There's no room for retries or delays. If a packet arrives late, it's useless—the conversation has already moved on. This makes video conferencing uniquely sensitive to network problems that other activities can hide.

You might have fast internet that handles Netflix perfectly, yet still struggle on calls. That's because streaming video buffers ahead—it downloads 30 seconds of content before you need it. Video calls can't do that. They need packets right now.

Three network characteristics matter most for call quality:

• Latency — How long packets take to make the round trip. High latency creates that annoying delay where people talk over each other.
• Jitter — How consistent that timing is. Even with decent average latency, inconsistent timing makes audio sound robotic and video stuttery.
• Packet loss — When packets go missing entirely. This causes audio dropouts and video freezing.

Where problems happen

Network issues can originate anywhere along the path:

• Your device — High CPU usage or low memory can make your computer struggle to encode video fast enough.
• Your WiFi — Weak signal, interference, or a crowded channel can cause packets to be lost or delayed.
• Your router — Bufferbloat and congestion from other devices can introduce latency and jitter.
• Your ISP — Outages, congestion, or routing issues between you and the video service.
• The service itself — Sometimes Zoom, Teams, or Meet has problems on their end.

Network Weather helps you pinpoint which segment is causing your problem, so you know whether to move closer to your router, restart your equipment, call your ISP, or just wait it out.

Explore the topics

Click any topic below to learn more about what it means, why it matters, and what you can do about it.