Your broadband speed test says 150 Mbps. Netflix works. The children’s games work. But every Teams call from the spare bedroom freezes, your voice turns robotic, and at least once a week you get thrown out of a meeting entirely.
We hear this constantly from people working from home along the M4 corridor, in Reading, Slough, Maidenhead and Bracknell, where hybrid work has turned spare rooms into full-time offices. The good news is that the cause is usually findable in under an hour, and it is rarely what the internet provider suggests on the phone.
This guide explains why video calls fail when everything else seems fine, how to find out whether the problem is your broadband or your WiFi, and the fixes that actually stop the dropouts.
Why video calls fail first
Most things you do online are forgiving. A web page can load in pieces. Netflix downloads ahead and fills a buffer, so a two-second gap in the connection is invisible. A game download just takes a bit longer.
A video call has no buffer. Your camera and microphone send a constant stream up, and everyone else’s picture streams down, in real time. Any gap, spike or slowdown shows up immediately as frozen faces, robotic audio or a dropped call.
So calls are a very sensitive test of your connection. If they fail and nothing else does, the connection is marginal somewhere. The question is where.
Step one: broadband or WiFi?
This is the single most useful test, and it takes five minutes.
- Take the laptop you use for calls and plug it into the router with an Ethernet cable.
- Turn off WiFi on the laptop so it cannot cheat.
- Make a test call, or join a meeting early, and run a speed test.
- Unplug, go back to your normal desk on WiFi, and repeat.
Then read the result:
- Good wired, bad at your desk: it is a WiFi problem inside the house. That is fixable and it is our job.
- Bad wired as well: it is the broadband line, the router or the provider’s network. Report it to them with the wired result as evidence.
- Good wired most of the day, bad wired in the evening: it is congestion on the provider’s network or the line. Again, the provider’s problem.
Most of the time we find the first result. The line is fine. The WiFi between the router and the spare room is not.
Common WiFi causes of dropped calls
Distance and walls
The router is in the hallway or the lounge, where the fibre or phone line comes in. The home office is the box room upstairs at the back. Between them sit a floor, a couple of brick walls, a chimney breast and maybe a steel beam. The signal arrives, but only just. Poor WiFi upstairs goes through why upper floors struggle.
The upload is the weak direction
WiFi is not equal in both directions. The router has good antennas and plenty of power. Your laptop has small antennas and limited power. In a marginal room the laptop can hear the router, but the router struggles to hear the laptop. Your download test looks acceptable. Your upload, which carries your video, is the part that fails.
Busy channels
In Reading terraces, Slough semis and Maidenhead flats, you might be able to see twenty or thirty neighbouring networks. Every one of them competes for the same airtime. Evenings are worst. A poorly placed mesh kit next door can be louder in your office than your own router.
Band steering and sticky devices
Modern routers offer 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz and try to move devices between them. Mesh systems try to move devices between nodes. When this is badly tuned, laptops cling to a weak signal or hop back and forth mid-call. Each hop is a freeze.
Extenders
A plug-in extender halves the available speed and adds delay, because it has to listen and repeat on the same radio. It is one of the most common causes of choppy calls we see. We explain why in why WiFi is slow with fast broadband.
Common broadband causes
If the wired test is also poor, look here.
- Low upload on an older line. Many copper connections in older parts of Reading and in rural villages only manage 1 to 2 Mbps upload. That is not enough for one HD call plus anything else.
- Other traffic. A cloud backup, a photo library sync or someone uploading to YouTube can saturate the upload.
- Old router firmware. It happens. Restart it, check for updates, and retest.
- Line faults. Crackly phone line, dropouts at the same time each day. Report them.
In rural areas where the line is the problem, a new connection is usually the fix. See Starlink vs 4G and 5G for rural Berkshire and when full fibre will reach your village.
Quick fixes to try tonight
- Sit closer to the router for important calls, as a temporary measure
- Move the router out of the cupboard and off the floor
- Pause cloud backups and large uploads during working hours
- Turn off the camera for large meetings when you do not need it
- Unplug the extender and see whether calls improve without it
- Forget and rejoin the network so the laptop picks the best band
These help. They are not a fix for a room that simply has weak coverage.
Fixes that last
A cable to the desk
For a desk you use every day, a cable is the answer. No channel congestion, no roaming, no weak upload. If the office is next to a room that already has a network point, the run can be short. Our guide to whether it is worth running Ethernet cable explains why wired still wins for work.
An access point in the office
If you use a laptop around the house as well as at the desk, put a ceiling access point in or near the office, on its own cable back to the router. It gives full-strength WiFi in both directions. That is the approach in why wired access points matter.
Mesh, done properly
In a two or three bedroom house without cabling, a good mesh system with nodes placed on landings and in hallways can stabilise calls. The key is that each node has a strong link back. A node in the far corner of the office is too late.
Garden offices
If you work from a garden office, the link from the house is almost always the weak point. A mesh node on the kitchen windowsill will not hold a call reliably across a garden. A buried Cat6 cable or a point to point wireless bridge will. See how to get internet to a garden office without dropouts and our garden office WiFi installation service.
Two people on calls at once
Hybrid households often have two or three people on calls at the same time, in different rooms. That doubles or triples the upload needed and puts more devices on the same WiFi. A home that worked for one remote worker can fall over with two. The fix is the same: stronger coverage where people actually work, and a line with enough upload for everyone.
What we do on a visit
We measure signal and speed at each desk, check the router and line, look at channel congestion, and find what is actually causing the dropouts. Then we recommend the smallest fix that will work, whether that is moving the router, adding one access point or running a cable to the office. WiFi troubleshooting explains the service.
Get your calls working
Send us two speed tests from your laptop: one wired next to the router, and one on WiFi at your desk. Tell us which room you work in and roughly when calls drop. That is usually enough for us to tell you what is going on.
We cover home offices across Slough, Maidenhead, Windsor, Bracknell, Reading and the rest of Berkshire. Contact us to book.