Teams Bandwidth requirements

Question

Hi Team,

We have more than 30+ sites having user count and bandwidth details. How do we plan for the bandwidth for MS Teams traffic?
I am aware of how much kbps for each modality is required. But need some insight and how to define bandwidth for each site.
Example: Appx 9 % concurrency rate for most of the locations and how do we define b/w requirements for each location?

Example:;

Site 1: 100 Mbps
User count: 300
Concurrency rate: ~9 %

Any predefined calc which I can use to generate the b/w requirements?

Thanks in Advance.

Regards,
MS

Answer 1

Hi @MS

Please see the following documentation:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/prepare-network#bandwidth-requirements

Teams is always conservative on bandwidth utilization and can deliver HD video quality in under 1.5Mbps.

Best performance is at 4,000 kbps, which translates to 500 KBps (0.5 MBps). I usually a lot 0.5MBps per user when planning for bandwith. The real question is what is your expectation of network load at any given time? Do you expect all 300 users to use Teams at the same time? If you expect even a quarter of your location to be using Teams at any given time then you would need 37.5 MBps (300 Mbps) to achieve the best performance.

Of course, Teams does optimize the call based on available bandwidth as stated in the documentation:

Where bandwidth isn't limited, Teams optimizes media quality, including high-fidelity audio, up to 1080p video resolution, and up to 30fps (frames per second) for video and content.

Teams optimization can provide HD video quality in under 1.5 Mbps, which in this case, you can realistically divide your Mbps by 1.5 and have ~67 people with HD video. This is not always as straight forward as users will be running other applications that chew up bits of the network as well (be aware of Windows update and other applications that are running in the background and perhaps mitigate them by enforcing them running during non-business hours).

Recommendation

I think what you should look into at such a large location is QoS (Quality of Service) controls on your networking to ensure that bandwidth is distributed evenly to all of your employees.

-------------------------------

If this is help please accept answer.