Offline

Last Tuesday, I had five consecutive Teams meetings booked. I landed with the early morning flight, and connected to the first meeting while in the car on the way to my ordinary office around 30 minutes from the airport. My plan was to transfer the call to my workstation upon arrival. Instead, as I parked my car, I got disconnected. Before long, I realized that I had no reception on my phone. Unfortunately, my office isn’t connected to fibre, and thus I am running a 5G broadband service. The problem is that when the phone tower dies, I am completely cut off from the world.

Computer, Engineering, HabitsRikard ÖqvistSeptember 13, 2024redundancy, backup, work, internet, failureComment

Physical meetings will never be replaced

Have you ever had that feeling in a Teams meeting where you interrupt each other by starting a new sentence “simultaneously”? And then you realize your interruption, so you go quiet, wait a little and start again because it seems as if the other person is giving you the que to go ahead, only to interrupt each other again. This almost never happens when you are talking to someone in the same room. I think the crucial difference here is latency. Over Teams, you introduce a handful of precious milliseconds, and they can make a world of difference. This is analogous to playing music in a band. To play in time, “tight”, the latency must be very low. This is also the reason why it is almost impossible to play music together online.

Acoustics, EngineeringRikard ÖqvistNovember 28, 2023communication, internet, latency, music, conversationComment