Blog Post

Microsoft Teams Support
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Users in China could experience poor audio, video or screen sharing in Meetings

Bill_Yuan's avatar
Bill_Yuan
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Sep 01, 2022

The China Premium network is a dedicated network that was setup to enable higher-quality access for Teams and other services for users based in China, using the public internet.  Be sure to review the following for more information: https://aka.ms/tuneChina

 

Microsoft Teams is taking an ongoing maintenance window to improve the China Premium network service.  More information is available in MC post MC422140, tenant Admins can click directly on that link to review.  

 

The maintenance window started on 24th August 2022 and is planned to complete by 30th, September 2022, UTC.  During this time period any users in China who join a Teams meeting hosted in another data center outside the Asia Pacific region will use China's regular cross-border network service.  This could result in poor quality for audio, video, and screen sharing.

 

Users in China can attempt to work around this situation by being the first person or client to join a given meeting, which ensures the meeting will be hosted in Asia Pacific regional data centers.   

 

However, if China users did not start or be first one to join the meeting, and the meeting includes users from other regions, they may experience poor quality for audio, video and screen sharing.  Most likely the meeting is hosted in another region.  In this scenario China users are connecting through the public Internet, which might be impacted by cross-border network congestion.

 

IT admins can confirm this scenario by validating the meeting's data center location with the following steps.  China users experiencing poor quality in a meeting that has already started can try turning off incoming video, disabling their own video, or dialing into the meeting via phone if available to improve performance.  

 

During the meeting

 

  • Collect the Wireshark trace and filter ‘UDP.port==3479’.

                  

 

  

               

 

 

                  

 

After the meeting

 

  • Through Call Analytics in Teams Admin Center.

 

  • Find out the Call ID
    • Go to TAC(Teams admin center)->Users->Manage users->find out the participants->Meetings&Calls->find out the affected meeting/call ID
  • Find out the Debug report
    • Click call ID->Participant details->click participant start time

 

                  

 

 

  • Click Debug report and search for the IP address under ‘Connectivity_RemoteMR’

 

                  

 

 

             

 

               

 

 

                  

 

 

  • Through Call Quality Diagnostic tool (QER report)

 

  • Search for the Call ID in the Search pane, and click Drill Through Meeting Health Details

 

 

                 

 

 

  • The Host Region shows where the meeting is hosted.

 

               

 

Last but not least, regardless of the regional data centers hosting the meeting, by design media traffic will access the Microsoft network at the nearest peering location to the endpoint. 

 

               

 

Updated Sep 01, 2022
Version 1.0
  • Thanks RyanSpoonerJCB, the issue you mentioned could be caused by something else, I would recommend doing some deep dive on the issue reported by your China users. The maintenance started on 24th, but we haven't rolled out any change until yesterday. 

  • Good to know, we've had complaints from our China users for a few days now.  Any reason you chose to announce this a whole week after it started, knowing the effect that it would have on users, especially those working for multinational companies?