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Bradley Wood's avatar
Bradley Wood
Brass Contributor
May 20, 2020

Multi Attendee Video Conferencing - Unusable Quality

hello,

 

we've been using Teams this past couple months.  Some of my staff are still at work and using a substantial internet connection.  Others are working from home, most of them have good high speed connections as well.

 

we can do any combination of one to one video conferences, however as soon as a third person joins, it is an unusable system.  Also, if we are having a 15 attendee conference call, one person could have video, but as soon as a second turned theirs on, it became unusable.

 

This has actually been the case for the entire past couple of months (the covid months).  I was hopeful there might be an improvement with the 3x3 rolling out, but that is not the case.

 

I've got a second group in another department also using Teams and they did their staff meeting yesterday.  the 3x3 worked, but quality was so poor they had to remain voice only.

 

I poked around in the Teams admin but didn't see anything specific that I might change to make video conferences usable. 

 

Any thoughts from the community?

 

Thanks

 

 

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5 Replies

  • StevenC365's avatar
    StevenC365
    MVP
    May 21, 2020

    Hi Bradley Wood ,

     

    It sounds very much to me that there are some network components getting in the way of Teams traffic. In a 1:1 call the data can be sent direct if the two parties are on the same network, but as soon as a third is added all need to connect via Microsoft.

     

    The defined requirement for Teams is that the clients can send UDP traffic on ports 3478-3481 directly to the internet, if this is blocked it will use TCP 443 https as a fallback, but the quality is far worse. If that's also being forced through a proxy server, then it'll be even worse again. If remote users are forced to use a VPN then all this will apply to them, again it's recommended that they have split tunneling so can send their Teams traffic directly.

     

    Here's the documentation about Teams networking https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/prepare-network

    • ChristianBergstrom's avatar
      ChristianBergstrom
      Silver Contributor
      May 21, 2020

      StevenC365 Hey Steven, great post! But what got my attention was the "This has actually been the case for the entire past couple of months (the covid months)".

      • Bradley Wood's avatar
        Bradley Wood
        Brass Contributor
        May 21, 2020

        ChristianBergstrom  - thanks to both of you for your comments.  I should have mentioned, we've only been using Teams this past couple months, so we have no positive experience in prior months.  I can see how increased use would cause some issues

         

        StevenC365 We aren't forcing people through VPN's, so that isn't a factor.  I'm at home and I've had 1:1 meetings with others at home, and others on premise.  However whenever we add a third, it is always including someone on premise.  An interesting component to investigate a bit further.  The firewall comments were useful, we will look into that.

         

        Thanks

  • ChristianBergstrom's avatar
    ChristianBergstrom
    Silver Contributor
    May 21, 2020

    Bradley Wood Hello, I understand and can confirm the behavior in some parts. But it's only happening sometimes so it's irregular and doesn't reflect how many we are in the meeting (as it can occur with 2-3 persons). My team members are set up with all the necessary prerequisites, so from my point of view I believe it is still part of the 'temporary feature adjustments' (due to the ongoing pandemic with the vast increase of cloud services) and I haven't heard of any update since the previous message from Microsoft.