[David Liao]

Try to get a fiber optic connection (examples: Verizon FiOS, AT&T Fiber, Google Fiber) if at all possible. If this is not possible, try to get a business cable internet connection. If business cable is not available, try getting residential cable internet service. In Europe, a DSL connection can also be excellent (if it is DSL from the curb to your residence). In the U.S., a DSL connection is often terrible for low latency audio (adds maybe a 30 ms penalty in ping). If you have no choice but to use DSL, ask the phone company whether they can turn interleaving off—this might or might not work well for you.

If you have no choice but to use a cellular connection, use a high-quality 5G connection. A 4G connection will not give good results (but there is no guarantee that a 5G connection will be adequate either, although a number of our users have gotten good results with 5G). If 5G is not available, you can try Starlink, with which we’ve gotten surprisingly good results allowing genuine real-time musical interaction.

It is vital to get a connection with low jitter and good upload performance. Try to get a connection with unloaded speed-test latencies at or under 10 ms and jitter values no more than about a couple ms. If possible, try to get a connection with at least 50 Mbit/s of upload speed (though a business cable connection with 35 Mbit/s of upload speed will work if that’s the best available). You can get latency and download/upload speed measurements for your connection at https://speedtest.net.

If you are stuck with 8 Mbit/s of upload speed on a congested cable connection, you might want to either turn your video off or go into Video Preferences and reduce your max outgoing video bandwidth to 75 kbps and your max resolution to 320.