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Bad network quality

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Copper Contributor

Hello,

 

Very often I get message during MS Teams conference calls "Bad Network quality" and then video starts lagging and voice quality drops. I am using a WiFi at home. When I connect to a WiFI 2.4GHz I get less bad network messages, then on WiFi 5GHz and if I connect to a mobile network via my cell phone's mobile hotspot it is even more stable.   It does not make sense to me because my home network on WiFi 2.4GHz provides 7ms ping and 40 Mbps download and on 5GHz WiFi it provides 3 ms ping and from 250 to 400Mbps.  However mobile network provides 33ms ping and around 20-40 Mbps download speed.

Is it really an issue with internet provider of my home network? I do not notice any problems using WiFi on other applications and devices.  For example ZOOM works without issues or Skype. 

19 Replies

@Eriks_Lizbovskis 

 

Are the calls just audio? Or is video and content being shared as well?  What kind of wireless equipment do you have at home?  Teams should automatically adjust quality of video, sharing, and audio based on the network bandwidth.  I have found similar situation myself, but I've also noticed when connected to 5 GHz wifi in my house, it fluctuates quite considerably on signal strength sometimes (even when I'm stationary).

 

On the call quality, can you take a look at the one of those calls on 5GHz and look under Network and see what the values are like for round-trip times, jiter, and packet loss, both from and to the service.  Compare those against being on 2.4GHz.

best response confirmed by ThereseSolimeno (Microsoft)
Solution

@Eriks_Lizbovskis It sounds as if you don't have the best local network connection. The varying WiFi speeds definitely seem to be an indicator. They should be the same if you are pinging. 

 

A ping represents a few bytes of data, it can tell you some things but not everything. Plus it sounds as f you are pinging a local router, so you have many miles to go before you get to the Teams servers. Also, ping and network download speeds have known to be cheated upon by some Internet providers. They can see what you are doing and temporarily provide significant amount of bandwidth to make the test look good.

 

Ping and Internet tests all represent small portions of time when compared to a video call. 

 

Try connecting directly with Ethernet. That will help determine if it is a WiFi issue.

A Bad Network quality can be very transient caused by many things, such as someone else on your network starting to stream data, or other people at your ISP. 

 

If you don't need to transmit video, then don't. You should also be able to turn it off from coming in. Video uses 20+ times the amount of network than voice does.

@Eriks_Lizbovskis Imessage and fast.com speedmessage and fast.com speed

 

I also get this message a lot. Most of my meetings use video/screen share, and we have large meeting with a global presence. I rarely get this message when connecting via my phone (samsung fold) on the same wifi, but I get it a lot on my laptop. Our wifi can get up to 130Mbps and is a commercial service (though I work from home). 

Same problem we have checked all network parameters ping/traces fine to teams ip but still users complaint facing issue with teams

@Eriks_LizbovskisI've had the same exact issue. My router is split in two bands, 2.4 GHz and 5 GHZ (this prevents the router choosing on its own, which doesn't work for certain of my applications). Teams only has trouble with the 5 GHz, which is running around 400 mbps, and not with the 2.4 GHz, which is considerably slower. There's no identifiable reason why this should be so. Has been true for a year under many different conditions.

@camelville Check your WiFi adapter, if you're using a newish computer, it may be using 802.11ax, and your router may not fully support it, that happened to me recently, I changed the protocol to 208.11ac and the problem stopped.

@CharlieJohnstone I dont think its network as am facing this issue as well in my office where other colleagues are not facing issue at the same time. It seems some Teams update issue which is happening on randomly basis on devices.  

@dwarkesh I am having this same issue all the time. I can run a speedtest in a window while it's reporting the bad network quality and get 25MB up/down which is the max I can get through the company VPN, and I get about 750MB without VPN connected.  I do not believe at all that it is network bandwidth. I have noticed at times by the time I get task manager to startup Teams is consuming very high CPU.

Ed, thanks for the reply...I have the same problem with audio dropout and "bad network quality" messages and it's much worse since the start of the year. Video meetings used to work fine and now they don't. I've tried both on and off my company's VPN, and both on WiFi and Ethernet connection. Other people on my team, connected at their own network, are reporting the same issues. Which makes me think this is a Teams problem and not a network problem.

@Mike_Owens It's pretty unlikely to be the service, as all users access the same infrastructure in their region. Microsoft would detect a service level issue pretty quickly.

Can you access Teams admin and the Call Quality Dashboard, and form there verify if the average call quality is dropping, nothing like using data to verify a perception.

If there is a point where it drops you can narrow in on what changed, Teams version, WiFi drivers, or perhaps some security tool was changed at that point.

 

@Eriks_Lizbovskis 

 

We also have users getting the "Poor Network Quality" pop up during board Teams meetings but its very intermittent. I can view the meeting quality form the Teams Admin Portal but its normally just one user. Does anyone know if Teams quality drops to the lowest user for all?

 

Screenshot 2022-02-03 102644.jpg

It’s possible to test the Wi-Fi signal strength available to Windows via the CMD prompt, if signal is weak this will cause problems with video / audio quality

Go to start and type CMD (And press enter) - A black Command prompt window will appear

simply type: netsh wlan show interfaces <Press Enter>

The screen will display various things including Router Channel Receive / Transmit rate and most importantly Signal strength (The further away from the router the worse the signal anything above 80 is good)
Radio type : 802.11ac
Authentication : WPA2-Personal
Cipher : CCMP
Connection mode : Auto Connect
Channel : 48
Receive rate (Mbps) : 702
Transmit rate (Mbps) : 702
Signal : 85%
Profile : Guest-BTWhole

We are having the same intermittent issue at the office. Its happening to our execs when on Teams call, I guess since they use it a lot. The odd part is that it only happens when they are using the laptop docking port. When undocked and in wireless the problem goes away. We have done the rounds of replacing hardware, headsets, power cords, looked for network errors etc. At this point I'm down to Googling and ran into this post. I'm at a loss... It has to be either a Teams problem or our firewall. 

@TonyH1965 

 

Did you found any solution to this ? We are facing same issue.

@TusharThakur 

 

We got our Network Provider to set up a policy to bypass security.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/enterprise/urls-and-ip-address-ranges?view=o365-world...

 

The policy is using the Microsoft Teams/Skype internet service group, this is a dynamic group that holds the IPs and ports for all outbound Teams/Skype traffic. This allows us to bypass the security profiles for only Teams/Skype destined traffic.

@Growler2022   What should I do if my signal is below 80%    It says 57%

 

were you able to solve it? I had the same issue like 3 months ago, and I think I uninstalled and install again.
but the issue came back.. For sure is not a real network quality.. I don want to keep doing the same every time .
There must be a MSFT solution
were you able to solve it?

@mivictoria0 

 

Recently had a user who was complaining of similar speed test of WiFi was 0.5mbits  another device on the same router had 100mbit,  in that case the Intel driver wasn't quite as quick as it could have been, deleting the device and driver and restarting the Dell Latitude laptop resolved the issue.  Thankfully there was a better driver to roll back to!

 

Couldn't believe an update could cause such disruption.  (Don't like deleting when users are working remotely but needs must!)

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by ThereseSolimeno (Microsoft)
Solution

@Eriks_Lizbovskis It sounds as if you don't have the best local network connection. The varying WiFi speeds definitely seem to be an indicator. They should be the same if you are pinging. 

 

A ping represents a few bytes of data, it can tell you some things but not everything. Plus it sounds as f you are pinging a local router, so you have many miles to go before you get to the Teams servers. Also, ping and network download speeds have known to be cheated upon by some Internet providers. They can see what you are doing and temporarily provide significant amount of bandwidth to make the test look good.

 

Ping and Internet tests all represent small portions of time when compared to a video call. 

 

Try connecting directly with Ethernet. That will help determine if it is a WiFi issue.

A Bad Network quality can be very transient caused by many things, such as someone else on your network starting to stream data, or other people at your ISP. 

 

If you don't need to transmit video, then don't. You should also be able to turn it off from coming in. Video uses 20+ times the amount of network than voice does.

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