Microsoft teams is addressing bandwidth problems for people for working from home.
Working from home has become a norm for many and it seems its going to be our reality for some time now. The businesses that have been profiting during this season have been the video conferencing companies, with the competition rising companies have to figure out how to improve their product.
Google has been tweaking Meet to ensure that it’s fit for the job of conducting video meetings from home or work during constrained conditions such as when the kids are streaming video at the same time as a work meeting needs to happen.
Microsoft is now tackling the same challenge for Teams – the chat, video and collaboration platform that has at least 115 million daily active users.
A lesson from Zoom.
The company is taking a leaf from Zoom’s strategy, which prioritizes audio over video to make sure users are heard over a poor broadband connection.
Microsoft explained in an update:
“Whether you want to preserve data or are in a location with a poor or limited network connection, sometimes it’s helpful to limit the amount of data you’re using during a video call,”
“A new low data mode allows users to cap the amount of data that will be used during Teams video calls, as well as to establish different settings based on network availability.”
Google is also attempting to address poor network connections for people working from home by automatically adjusting resource usage depending on network conditions, at home or on a corporate network.
Google made a few adjustments too.
In January Google offered Workspace users a new troubleshooting tool for Google Meet that shows users why a local setup may be delivering a poor audio or video experience. For remote workers, it also delivered a new preview experience to help users sort out laggy video and muted mics before entering a call.
The Microsoft 365 and Teams group has been busy during the pandemic, closing feature gaps between Teams and Zoom. One of the biggest was the lack of a 49-person grid view, which Microsoft addressed in the latter part of 2020.
