I constantly have lag with video or people sound like robots, why?

Disconnects, lockups, and lag are directly related to your connection, between your device (Horizon View client) and PTC’s VDI infrastructure. There are four components to troubleshoot: your device, your connection to your home network (wireless), your connection to the Internet, and your provider’s Internet connection. The methods to diagnosis a VDI problems are not exclusive to VDI. You can apply these methods to diagnosing problems with other real-time protocols, such as Blackboard Collaborate.

Your Device

  If other sites that are time sensitive, such as YouTube and Netflix are working fine and not buffering you can assume your device is fine and working properly. However, operating system updates that are waiting for a reboot, can make your device act erratic. So a simple reboot of the device can usually solve any problem related to the device itself. In other cases your anti-virus/anti-malware can prevent you from connecting to VDI or even installation of the client. You can test if your anti-virus/anti-malware by temporarily turning it off and trying your connection. If your anti-virus/anti-malware is to blame, contact the vendor to resolve the problem.

Your Local Connection

  If your wireless connection is poor because the Wireless Access Point (WAP) is far away from your device, your local connection could be a problem. The easiest way to test if your local connection is the problem, is to connect your device to the back of your home router with a network patch cable. If the problem goes away and distance from the WAP is believed to be the cause, then it may be time to upgrade your wireless router to a mesh system, such as Google Nest or Amazon Eero.

Some things to consider: Never use a wireless extender or repeater, they reduce your bandwidth in half and can cause more problems than they intend to solve. In some rare cases wireless congestion can also be the problem, if you live an apartment complex where there is an over abundance of wireless clients in a relatively small area.

Your Internet Connection

  This is the most common cause of problems with disconnects, lockups, and lag. This usually requires a call to your Internet provider and hopefully it is an ongoing problem and not an intermittent problem. Intermittent problems are much more difficult to solve than ongoing problems. However before you call your Internet provider it is advisable to establish a baseline, so you can confirm when the problem is fixed and you have an detailed observation of the problem. There are four components to a healthy Internet connection that are divided into two categories of speed and quality.

Speed

Speed test can be performed with the website https://www.meter.net/ or just typing ‘Speed Test’ into Google and then clicking Run Speed Test as the first result. If you get poor results the first time, run it again or switch the destination server you are testing against (depending on the test site).

Download Speed

Download speed should be at least 10Mb/s to 15 Mb/s and the average download speed is usually 25 Mb/s. Any speeds below 10 Mb/s can cause problems, especially if there are multiple people in your house sharing your Internet connection. You can increase your speeds with your Internet provider at an additional cost. If you already pay for a higher speed than what is being reported with the website mentioned above, then you should contact your provider and explain your observation.

Upload Speed

Upload speeds will always be slower than download speeds, you should have at least 3 to 5 Mb/s or higher to the Internet for proper VDI function. If your speeds are lower than 3 Mb/s then this could be a cause of concern with your connection. Generally you will not pay directly for a higher upload rates, so your provider will usually not entertain fixing upload rates. However the upload rate is usually proportional to your download rate. So if you have a poor download rate, then the upload rate is usually affected as well.

Quality

Your speed can report back within the normal range, but in some cases there is congestion on the Internet causing problems. The quality of your connection is very important for real-time applications like Blackboard Collaborate and VDI. A website such as https://www.meter.net/ping-test/ can help you obtain the latency (overall delay) and Jitter (consistency) of your connection, as shown below.

Ping

A Ping is a simple test that is measured in milliseconds (ms). This value is the reported time it takes to send data to the destination and the destination back to you, it is also sometimes called the round trip time (RTT). This value should have an average of less than 20ms to 90ms, anything average that approaches 100ms can cause severe problems, lag or even disconnects. Keep in mind that 100 milliseconds is 1/10 th of a second, this is an eternity for time sensitive data.

Jitter

Jitter is the measurement of the difference between Ping times. If you have a high Ping rate such as 80ms, most real-time protocols can usually adjust to give you a smooth experience. However when the ping jumps between 80ms and 20ms (jitter of 60ms), it is similar to driving at a high speed only to slam on the brakes when you see traffic ahead. Jitter should be no more than 10ms to 25ms, anything higher than 25ms can cause problems with Blackboard Collaborate and VDI. Jitter and Ping generally go hand and hand and you can see this in the graphing that the website mention above creates.

Before calling your provider that usually results in a dreaded service call, you can try the following. After trying each of the suggestions below you should rerun the tests, to see if anything has improved.

• Reboot your cable or DSL modem.
• Reboot you wireless access point.
• Check all of your connections are hand tight, starting with the coaxial connections at the outside of your house to the back of your modem.
• Remove any unused splitters, if you have a cable modem.
• Make sure phone filters are in place on phones, if you have DSL.

Provider’s Internet Connection

  In many cases your provider can have a problem in your metropolitan area or their Internet provider may have problems. The tools and methods mentioned above can help you identify if a problem is within your home or external to your home. If the problem is external to you home it will be out of your control, but we recommend starting a conversation with your provider. In rare cases PTC can experience problems with our Internet providers, we strive to identify these issues right away and communicate them via email.