Since operations transitioned from on-site to a remote scenario, continuity and high quality in meetings and phone are two relevant aspects for any company when looking for a communications provider. Through the years, Microsoft Teams has evolved by integrating features that optimize workflows and that meet the needs of hybrid organizations. Today we will take a closer look at Quality of Service (QoS), a feature that improves user experience by prioritizing the Teams real-time traffic against lower priority traffic.
Enabling Quality of Service (QoS) on your Teams infrastructure
Quality of Service (QoS) in Microsoft Teams is a combination of networking technologies that enables organizations to optimize the end-user experience for real time audio, video, and application sharing communications. QoS allows real-time network traffic that is sensitive to network delays to “cut in line” in front of traffic that is less sensitive (like downloading a new app, where an extra second to download isn’t a large deal). QoS uses Windows Group Policy Objects and Port-based Access Control Lists to identify and mark all packets in real-time streams. This helps your network to give voice, video, and screen share streams a dedicated portion of network bandwidth.
Source: Microsoft
Quality issues users might experience without QoS
- Jitter – media packets arriving at different rates, which can result in missing words or syllables in calls
- Packet loss – packets dropped, which can also result in lower voice quality and hard to understand speech
- Delayed round-trip time (RTT) – media packets take a long time to reach their destinations, which result in noticeable delays between two parties in a conversation and causes people to talk over each other
To address these issues, you must increase the size of the data connections, both internally and out to the internet. Since adding bandwidth is often more complex and expensive, we recommend that you first use QoS which provides a way to manage the resources more effectively and then add bandwidth only where necessary.
Read more about implementing Quality of Service (QoS) for Teams here.
Make sure your network is optimized
A lack of bandwidth leads to poor user experience, so it is important that organizations use reporting such as call analytics and Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) to identify network problems and then make adjustments using QoS and selective bandwidth additions when needed.
To learn how to spot and troubleshoot common voice problems read this article: 5 ways to troubleshoot the most common Microsoft Teams VoIP problems
Quality of Service is a huge concern for any customer using Microsoft Teams, so if you need further assistance with quality or security improvements, our Microsoft certified specialists are ready to assist you on any business requirement you might have. Do not hesitate to reach out today.
