Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

You may find that your home connection that seemed adequate before becomes slow or unusable when additional people are trying to participate in remote meetings simultaneously. Neighborhood or regional slowdowns may also occur due to the additional load. You can take steps to reduce the bandwidth needed at home. It¡¯s also wise to prepare a backup plan for times when you may not be able to connect at all. Here are some tips that may help.

Freeing up bandwidth

• Reduce meeting video quality or turn off if not needed.
  • In Zoom, go to Settings > Video > My Video and uncheck Enable HD:
    
  • In Google Hangouts Meet, go to Settings > Video and set both Send resolution (maximum) and Receive resolution (maximum) to Standard definition (360p).
    
    If you want to reduce bandwidth even further, set Receive resolution (maximum) to Standard definition (360p), one video at a time. This means you will see the active speaker, but not thumbnails of the other participants.
• Turn off or disconnect unneeded connected devices at home. Be aware that some devices may try to reconnect automatically.
• Use local media files instead of streaming services during work hours. You may be able to cache files in some media players for later offline use.
• Use a phone instead of meeting software for voice communications. Some mobile phones use wifi calling that does use bandwidth. Turn this off in your phone¡¯s calling options, or turn off wifi on your phone.
• Use a phone and share an online document instead of using meeting software with screen sharing.
• Close unnecessary applications or open web pages.

Backup plans

• Make a Plan B for how you will get in touch with people if your first choice of communication tool is not available.
• Have local copies of phone numbers, important documents, and things you can work on offline.
• Make a habit of recording meetings for people who may have connection issues. Depending on your phone model, you may be able to record phone-only meetings with a mobile app.

Related information

• Audio description
  • It is important to describe what is being presented visually so it will make sense when someone is listening to the audio, even if they can¡¯t see the visuals.
  • Instructors and presenters who try this approach often report that it ends up being beneficial to many. For a deeper dive check out this article from Disability Studies Quarterly.
• Downloading material to work offline
  • In D2L Brightspace, users can download materials from the table of contents to read while offline. Note – this will be a static copy. Users must typically be online to complete work in homework systems.
  • Text to speech can be used to create MP3s of reading materials. Users can create these files with the voice they prefer, and set the rate of speech for as fast or as slow as they like. This can be great for people who are trying to reduce eye fatigue, but can also be helpful if members of a household are needing to coordinate on the timing for when each will be online.