Success Story Microsoft Teams media quality improvement

A consumer goods company with two headquarters based in the United Kingdom experienced degraded Microsoft Teams media quality in September 2020 when the global pandemic forced most of the global population to work from home. The two HQ buildings mostly were empty of regular staff except for a limited number of the finance and management team who were preparing for a presentation of corporate financial numbers. During the days these teams were convening in the office and they noticed the Microsoft Teams audio and video quality of home-based employees was greatly varying. It would not matter if connected on wired ethernet or on the corporate Wi-Fi, the experienced quality would greatly differ.

I was brought into the customer to consult on the experienced issue(s), recommend a solution to the issue(s) and if possible, resolve (during the assessment project) with approval process.

I used a predefined methodology which starts with a kick-off call with the involved parties to set forth my assessment plan, discuss the timelines and the future steps after the assessment. The second step in the methodology was to collect design documents, hold technical calls to dive deeper into the design documents. The third step is to setup testing agents to generate audio/video traffic and measure the infrastructure response which would be running for a duration of four calendar weeks. During these four weeks the collected response data is analysed and the root causes for the degraded quality are pinpointed and correlated with the design documents. The fourth and final step is to create a report listing all the findings in previous steps and the fitting remediation actions.

The main issues identified: 

· Proxy occasionally adding up to 500mSec of latency for a number of business hours

· Wireless misconfigurations, Access Point output power, QoS, Data rates

· Integral QoS design conflicting with Teams requirement.

1.Discussion with the proxy provider easily solved the unwanted latency.

2.Tuning of the Access Points power output and data rate improved Teams media quality. Additional recommendations for a post site survey and further tuning were given for additional benefits.

3.Recommendations on QoS markings and classifications were provided which the customer fully understood and took on as improvement projects.

The result of this assessment was instantly noticed by the management and financial department as they were still working in the buildings.

The additional recommendation for the customer is what monitoring would be beneficial so they would be able to identify in-house when an issue would occur and how to approach the Root Cause Analysis.

The total time from the first call to the final deliverable report took a total of 9 weeks. This included the contract discussion, designing of assessment and testing plans.