Microsoft Teams Call Quality
The best-kept secret to improve your Microsoft Teams call quality.
Monitor and improve Microsoft Teams call quality
Microsoft Teams’ audio and video conferencing are becoming second nature to everyone, from corporate employees to scholars. And at some point, everyone experiences a caller’s voice breaking up or cutting out mid-way during an important call, meeting, or lecture. Not to mention the unnerving facial expressions stuck on your screen when your video froze.
What is causing these distortions and interruptions? More importantly, is there a way to monitor and improve Microsoft Teams call quality challenges?
3 key health issues on Teams call quality
Three main call health issues or problems are categorised as causing negative user experience. These are Packet loss, Jitter, and Round-Trip. To explain, let’s look at each individually:
Packet loss (dropped signal / dropped calls)
Firstly, what are packets? Packets are the method to transfer data along a given network path to a destination. Sending smaller packets improves transmission rates, but occasionally these packets fail to reach their predetermined end. As a result, the end-user experiences disruptions like slow response or network connectivity loss. Video- and Audio-conferencing applications, like Microsoft Teams, rely on real-time packet processing, and will undergoing packet loss will affect them the most. Packet loss is ordinarily the cause of data transmission or network congestion.
Jitter (voice/video distortion)
Secondly, Jitter is the irregular time delay on a packet flow between two systems. In other words, from when a signal transmits over a network connection to when the signal is received. This time delay causes the end-user to experience voice or video distortion.
It is unlikely that any network will experience zero percentage jitter. So, there is a willingness to accept, to a degree, irregular fluctuations in data transfers. We refer to this as ‘acceptable Jitter’. Jitter is the cause of network congestion, poor hardware performance, route changes, and not implementing packet prioritization.
Round-trip (time taken to connect users)
The last main challenge is round-trip delay or round-trip time (RTT). RTT is the amount of time it takes to send a signal plus the amount of time it takes to affirm that the signal is received. In other words, the time between a request for data and the display of that data.
To exemplify, assume there are two users, one based in South Africa and another in California. When the user in South Africa requests to contact the user in California, the network traffic transfers the request across many routers before reaching the server located in California. Once the request reverts to South Africa, you can roughly work out the estimated round-trip time (RTT) of the transmission.
What influences round-trip time RTT?
- The physical distance between the locations
- Response time of the server where the request originates
- Transmission medium e.g. coaxial cables, fibre, cables, satellite
- Network traffic – traffic on the local area network can bottleneck a connection.
Improve call quality with o365Automated
End users hastily state that poor Teams call quality was caused by the network when their user experience is negatively affected. It is therefore imperative to identify the connection failure and pinpoint the affected area.
It might be a Wireless Access Point (AP) failure and only limited to a specific floor in a building. Perhaps the problem is confined to iOS users only. With accurate data analytics and insights into trends, you can make informed and proactive decisions to mitigate any call quality issues.
o365Automated offers a monitoring service to improve your Microsoft Teams call quality. And in turn, your end-user experience. The platform compiles a dashboard depicting health issues affecting Microsoft Teams call quality. It enables you to create thresholds/parameters incorporated with recommendations from Microsoft. Automating alerts when predefined conditions are triggered.
Get in touch with o365Automated for a no obligation Demo and let’s show you how to monitor Microsoft Teams call quality more efficiently.
