Why is only my internet connection crap?

[Mrs Pingu]

Pingu and I are both WFH. He's using our personal laptop, I'm on company issue.
My internet connection is really shite. We're both on the same network but our personal laptop is quite happily getting 25 to 35Mbps (we should be on double that as of yesterday but that's another story) while my company laptop was struggling to get 1 this morning!
Even using a LAN cable doesn't help, which makes me think it's something to do with the giblets of my laptop.

Any suggestions?

[mrcharly-YHT]

Could be that your company machine is running lots of stuff in the background. VPN software, anti-virus stuff, software license validation software, etc.

[Feanor]

Is your connection going down a VPN to the mothership and hitting the Internet through the mothership, versus his just hitting the Internet locally?
The mothership's VPN and Internet connection may be the bottleneck.

Many company VPNs are a bit stressed with the current levels of WFH, and were not designed for the level of throughput they are having to deal with.

[Kim]

One of barakta's ork VPNs is as flaky as a very flaky thing due to congestion.  I was pleased to note it was particularly bad during the traditional Sunday evening "I suppose I'm actually going to have to do my homework" slot.  You could almost hear Songs of Praise in the background.

[ian]

Our mothership VPN slows things down tremendously – I get 70Mb/s from BT, but on a good day 12 on the VPN and those happy 'you internet is shit' warnings in Teams.

Not all wifi reception is even, my wife's Lenovo struggles unless she's very close to the wifi source, whereas the Mac next to it got a full-on signal (I had to move a mesh thing from the bedroom to her office to stop her complaining).

[Mrs Pingu]

Update:
Being off the VPN made no difference. I closed all the obvious apps.
Pingu brought our laptop up to my 'office' and he got good  speed on both Whiffy and LAN.
I then decided to try taking my laptop off the docking station.....
WiFi suddenly double the speed.
Put laptop back on the docking station, shite again.

Did some googling and found some comments on docking stations buggering up the 2.4Ghz band. Switched to the 5Ghz band and bingo, I suddenly have the expected speed!
(I thought I had tried this the last time I had problems and I couldn't get connected but apparently not).

Now, this might just be coincidence and an intermittent fault, and it doesn't explain why it was still shit with the LAN cable connected. But it's working now, will see if it continues to do so ..

[barakta]

I've just spent a quality 30 mins watching job2's IT slowly move round my desktop and painstakingly type the full URL even tho Google autocompleted correctly.

He's updated some drivers and hopefully my VPN laptop will be less terrible. I can now also use my external screen properly which it wouldn't do without the dock drivers installed properly. AND I've got some random icons off the desktop that needed admin privs to remove and stopped the old VPN software from auto loading and needing about 4 mins of clicking to kill. He couldn't fix the creative cloud popups every time I open PDFs and Chrome not-saving settings like history or bookmarks tho but I can live with those issues.

Annoyingly microshite teams seems to merge all your teams identities into the same app so if I'm on DMU teams it starts opening BCU stuff as well which is rude and annoying. I'd like the logins completely separated from one another as they're separate jobs. Also, teams, it's shit.

[Morat]

Also, teams, it's shit.

Everyone else is using it AND it's expensive so it must be brilliant. Just like Windows. And Office.

[ian]

I find Teams a lot less awful than Webex/Jabber, though we were on Slack for a while. Teams is technically free as part of our Microsoft deal for Office 365 and some Azure services (so our technology director told me).

[Morat]

I think he's having a bit of a joke
Anything MS is free, as long as you pay for the rest of the bundle!

[ian]

Well yes, it wasn't an additional cost as we already use MS stuff, whereas Slack was an additional cost. And for a mid-sized company, that is a fairly substantial cost.

[Kim]

Audio sync in teams is atrocious for some reason, and it doesn't let you pin the interpreter thobut.  (To be fair, Zoom took most of the year to work out they needed to do this.)

I don't understand what the problem is.  Drop some frames and get on with it.

[FifeingEejit]

Pingu and I are both WFH. He's using our personal laptop, I'm on company issue.
My internet connection is really shite. We're both on the same network but our personal laptop is quite happily getting 25 to 35Mbps (we should be on double that as of yesterday but that's another story) while my company laptop was struggling to get 1 this morning!
Even using a LAN cable doesn't help, which makes me think it's something to do with the giblets of my laptop.

Any suggestions?

The speed difference between my desktop and my VPNed laptop is 10mbps when connected up here and being tested at night, things were getting quite clunky on the training course that's allowing me to be working here earlier.
There's also a greater speed penalty when I've got the laptop on WiFi

Our mothership VPN slows things down tremendously – I get 70Mb/s from BT, but on a good day 12 on the VPN and those happy 'you internet is shit' warnings in Teams.

Get them more at work than at home, but my machine isn't exactly priority for network compared to the various network connected things at other sites.

[Mrs Pingu]

Everything seemed ok today, even did video on Teams with no problems.
Took me 2 hours to figure out how to get all my desktop icons to go back to monitor #1 instead of #2 where they went after I was dicking about with the laptop docked/docked/undocked though.

[barakta]

Teams does now let you pin up to 4 people which is an improvement. Zoom is supposed to be allowing multiple pin at some point but probably needs a pro account.

I have to say the teams craptions are surprisingly good. I tried them today cos I bloopered my captioning booking and for the young generic RP speaking young man they were reasonably accurate and more useful QUICK, usually automated captions lag to fuck and burst splurt. Now all they need to do is let us 1) see a transcript all at once and 2) let us save the transcript text...

The sync can get to fuck tho, awful today. And terrible mpeggy artefacts on so many faces and distorted audio. Zoom is rarely that bad and is more accessible all round.

WebEx is the worst video conferencing I've seen yet; a conference I did online was well and truly fuxx0red by it throughout. It couldn't do mute status properly at all - was showing ppl as unmuted but they were muted. Wouldn't share documents properly. Constantly disconnected people. AWFUL. And we were trying to get lawyers to use it, and they're technically inept at best; but I've seen a Zoom equivalent and it was 90% less awful.

[chrisbainbridge]

If you think those are bad then try CVP the Court video platform.  Makes any of those mentioned look amazing

[Afasoas]

The conclusion I've reached is that all 'conferencing/collaboration' software be rubbish. I think it is an industry where the people writing it don't themselves have to collaborate.
Why can't they automatically turn off video for people on a call that don't have the bandwidth?

[Kim]

The conclusion I've reached is that all 'conferencing/collaboration' software be rubbish. I think it is an industry where the people writing it don't themselves have to collaborate.

It's software developers.  They're not going to be collaborating by video chat, they'll be using traditional methods like email, IRC/Slack and passive-aggressive commit messages.