Teams Calls - Dropping out, stuttering, freezing.

[#1]

Hello all

Product: Full Fibre 500

When on Teams calls - I work from home - I often have awful connection issues where the screen freezes, or stutters and I miss what colleagues are saying. All I can hear is a loud buzzing noise coming from the laptop. 

This is despite closing all Windows tabs, and all Office applications including Outlook. Literally the only thing operating is Teams.

My home office is in a front bedroom as far from the router in the kitchen as you can get in a small 3 bed house but for the first 3 months using Plusnet there weren't any problems. The issues only started in June. 

What can I do to improve this? 

Thanks for your feedback.

Kind regards, Joanna

[#2]

1) Get a long network cable and run it through the house. Fairly cheap but inelegant.

2) Try some powerline network extenders. Get them from Argos so if they don't help they are relatively easy to return (the first search hit wasTP-Link AV1000 Powerline Starter Kit). I'm by no means a fan of these devices but they may be an easy fix in this case.

3) Is anything doing large backups? Onedrive is a prime culprit for this. On a work laptop something may have been changed "behind the scenes" and you would never know.

4) Longer term a better WiFi setup (or ideally some installed cables) may be the answer. A mesh system is probably what you want but I can't personally recommend one. That also might be best purchased from somewhere good about returns!

[#3]

By the way, if the FAST speedtest was on WiFi from the laptop in that location that is very good.

Another possibility is that the laptop is overheating and turning down it's CPU or it's not actually up to the job.

If you can try the long network cable (to eliminate that possibility) then you can go to the work IT team and put the problem to them.

With modern laptops sometimes an adaptor or dock is needed to use a wired network connection.

[#4]

@joannaharding 

As you have Full Fibre and work from home it might be worthwhile spending some money running ethernet cable if it's possible. Even consider taking a cable external then round the front of the porperty and than back in upstairs to your office.

While not the cheapest option it does give a solid starting point in your office and is future proof.

Brian