There are a few things that most meetings could benefit from. Having an organizer who's aware of the differences between leading an in person meeting and a remote meeting, cutting video to save bandwidth if the meeting doesn't absolutely need it (the organizer can usually just disable the function), muting when you're not speaking (by far the best quality of life improvement, can be done silently by the organizer if someone is just doing their Vader impersonation throughout the meeting), using the "raise hand" function (again, the organizer plays a huge role here), using the native app instead of the web one usually provides better quality and performance, using a wired connection instead of wireless if possible, sometimes even starting meetings at non-standard hours (like 15 to/past the hour) helps avoid the rush of people logging in at the same time, etc.
Typical restart-all-the-things usually made it go away. But it wasn’t unusual for 500ms of latency to slowly build up during a 30min call. Unfortunately I have nothing more useful to add, the issue resolved itself before I could track down a definitive cause.
Stop using it.
Without even looking at your setup, I would bet $100 minimum that it's Bluetooth latency. It adds a lot of latency, 500ms is not unusual, and many folks have no idea that all that latency is really just the last 18 inches. This is why you're seeing more and more cases where people are using good old iPhone wired earphone for conference calling, especially when skyping a TV interview.
How are you measuring? Half that is considered high-end from what I'm reading[1], and AirPods Pro apparently reduce that to 150ms.
Bluetooth definitely is the issue with 95% of these latency issues.
Crazy that airpods have that much latency. I have bluetooth in the car and it has way too much latency - I thought Apple had improved it to not be noticeable but I never checked the numbers.
Incidentally, for playing midi instruments you generally want things to be below 8ms to feel natural. 150ms is an eternity.
Is the lipsync ok if you watch a video on an iphone with airpods?
For video they compensate for the latency by displaying the visuals slightly delayed (this has been done for over a decade even way back on feature phones).
Even game consoles have the option to do this since some TVs/receivers have audio or video latency.
When a conference call is made up of people all in the same city on decent internet connections, latency is usually not a big issue.
But when a conference call has people from New York, San Francisco, and Japan on it, even if it's only 3 participants, latency can be bad just because of the speed of light, essentially (on top of what is otherwise reasonable hardware/software latency). Latency may be bad even if you're talking with a colleague in the same city, since the audio is "mixed" on the server, and that server might be across the world if a participant from across the world started the meeting. (Counterintuitively, the latency with your local colleague could be twice as bad as with the colleague from across the world.)