Months. Months of troubleshooting (to be fair, a lot of those I was just at home, and doing nothing).

Zoom on my dad’s laptop has been terrible. Like 180p 4fps terrible. 30-60% packet loss terrible (Zooms Statistics item in the config is fantastic for checking network performance).

Ages ago I thought I fixed it by killing off all the Intel Killer Network bloat that is supposed to “improve network performance” - total BS. It is some client side QoS and it is shit, truely shit.

But, the issues has started coming back. If I connect his laptop to a VPN back to my house, issue goes away, video conferencing is fine again. But this test has never isolated the original issue. Was enabling a VPN on his laptop changing some network config and stopping whatever was breaking Zoom?

What was really odd this time is if I connect his laptop to my iPad as a wi-fi hotspot the issue goes away. So it really does seem like a combination of his home internet, plus his laptop. Only his laptop. All other devices at home are fine.

Today I managed to route all traffic from his laptop over a WireGuard VPN to my house, but from the home router - not changing anything on his laptop at all.

Route the traffic back to my place, Zoom is happy, 640p 30fps. Route the traffic back out their home Internet, Zoom is not happy 320p, 240p, 180p 7fps.

Reconfigure the firewall on the router on the fly, traffic back out to my place, 640p 30fps.

Trying to start the call off the VPN and move on the VPN - same result.

So … why is there a combination of just his laptop, plus the home internet that ruins video conferencing apps.

I still don’t know - but now I think Optus is legit messing with some packets.

I have found a few references online to Optus HFC NBN and corporate Zoom accounts being bad, and I think there might be something to that.

On the plus side, several days with an EdgeRouter X and I am wondering if I should buy a bigger one for home to replace the OpnSense box I am using … but that would be a bad idea.

(But after getting my head around the EdgeRouter, I really like it - now setting up some other stuff on it for easier remote support from my place…)