Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act

It works really well.

One that has been a total game changer for my company is when I'm hosting a conference call, I can simply "Invite by Phone" my participants. They get a phone call, are prompted to "Press 1 to enter the conference", and boom they're in. It's drastically reduced people fumbling around with phone numbers + participant codes, ending up in the wrong meeting, or getting stuck in some unnecessary software install loop. If someone is more than two minutes late, they're getting a phone call that brings them instantly into the meeting.

Also a really nice feature, again for phone conferences, is when people dial-in I see their phone number handle in the UI. But during the call as they introduce themselves or I look up their number, I can then rename their user to something recognizable. Now if I'm on a call with 5 people at another firm, I appear really impressive because I know who each person is by their name. When someone is speaking on the conference call, their icon lights up. If someone has a ton of background noise I can easily mute them.

Zoom Phone (addl paid feature) is awesome too. Virtual phone numbers, IVR, call routing, busy hours, I can instantly turn a 1:1 conversation into a zoom meeting that other people can join, etc. Zoom Phone works on my iphone like a regular dialer, and I can place/receive fully digital calls on it (pretty similar to how Google Voice works), so it doesn't matter if I have actual cell service.

I've never used Microsoft Teams, and does look really snazzy, but Zoom is an absolute joy to use compared to every single other conferencing software I have ever used. The video chat and screensharing is fast and responsive and just works exactly like you would expect it to.

> It works really well.

Does it?

Asking because I just left a zoom meeting with horrible sound quality and extremely bad video quality. Why would anyone prefer that to Teams is beyond me.

Edit: interesting this is _heavily_ downvoted. Can't a person have a bad experience and tell HN about it?

> Can't a person have a bad experience and tell HN about it?

Not necessarily, no. It's downvoted because it's one low-evidence anecdote amidst comments from people who've been using it daily (two years, here). That doesn't mean it didn't happen, but without supporting evidence it's difficult to find relevance in a single poor call.

Some basic evidentiary questions for you to consider, that would help distinguish between "someone's Internet was broken" (more likely) and "Zoom is defective" (less likely), for example:

1) Was only one participant experiencing issues, or were all participants blurry? Did Zoom warn you that of connection instability? Did Zoom show yellow or red connection status bars for the affected participant(s)?

2) Does your (or their) Internet connection show instability such as high latency (Bufferbloat) when performing a speed test capable of measuring and reporting latency-under-load fluctuations? https://dslreports.com/speedtest

3) Did the sound quality issue involving one or more participants who were not using in-ear or over-ear headphones?

4) Was the sound quality issue reproducible in a followup call for testing? Was it reproducible using "call in by phone" audio rather than "internet" audio for testing?

EDIT:

5) If you stop sharing your video, does the problem improve? If you activate screen sharing, does the problem worsen?

But if you downvote anything that is not compatible with your own experience, where does that leave us?

To answer your other questions: this was not the first time and there are others here expressing similar issues. Teams works reasonably well from same computer & network.