Teams Audio Problems

Keeping an eye out on audio quality in Teams

As you are aware of by now Teams and especially Teams audio can make a big difference to users when introducing Teams to your users. As we have become used to the good quality found in the old copper wire telephony the same now goes for audio quality when performing Teams calls mainly to/from PSTN connections over the Internet.

Any discrepancy to audio and our human ears will pick up on it, and there are quite a few things that can influence audio between end-to-end users.

Most user problems that can be affecting audio, can be related to these:

• Wi-Fi (coverage, bandwidth)
• VPN
• Missing firewall configurations (ports and IP’s)
• Outdated clients or drivers
• Network devices
• Poor bandwidth

Things that will give users poor audio are, for example, occurrences of high levels of Jitter, Packet loss as well as Round-trip time.

So, what can be used to investigate as well as look for trends or occurrences from the Teams side?

Here are some suggestions that can help with this:

1. Check Microsoft Office 365 requirements for ports and IP’s as well as your Microsoft 365 admin center Health dashboard.
2. Microsoft 365 network connectivity test tool, get a good overview of your access towards Microsoft Office 365.
3. Microsoft Teams Network Assessment Tool, test network performance and connectivity to test Microsoft Teams calls through the network (run through PowerShell).
4. Call Health in an ongoing call or meeting. Check the Network and Audio quality during the meeting or call by choosing Call Health through the More actions  menu.
5. Health Dashboard for Direct Routing, see information about Latency, Jitter or Packet Loss having occurred when using a Direct Routing Service.
6. QER Power BI Templates. Use Microsoft Teams Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) data together with PowerBi. Download the CQD Power BI Query Templates and run the latest QER Power BI Template to keep an eye out for possible issues impacting Teams meeting and calling experiences.

*Also, as a reminder, keep your Teams clients and Windows drivers updated in order to adapt to Microsoft’s latest changes.