Improve call quality in Microsoft Teams

This article introduces three key tools you can use to monitor, troubleshoot, manage, and improve call quality in Microsoft Teams.

  • Call Quality Dashboard (CQD): To analyze org-wide trends or problems, drive improvements to performance

  • Call analytics: To analyze call and meeting quality for individual users

  • Quality of Service (QoS): To prioritize important network traffic

Monitor and troubleshoot call quality

You'll use per-user Call analytics and Call Quality Dashboard to find and troubleshoot call-quality problems that come up during ongoing operation. This lets you drive performance improvements across your network. Both of these tools are in the Teams admin center.

Call analytics and CQD run in parallel and can be used independently or together. For example, if a communications support specialist determines that they need more help troubleshooting a user's call problem, they escalate the call to a communications support engineer, who has access to additional information about the call. In turn, the communications support engineer alerts a network engineer to a possible site-related issue they noticed in the call analytics. The network engineer checks CQD to see if an overall site-related issue could be a contributing cause of the user's call problem.

Prioritize important network traffic using QoS

As your users start using Teams for calls and meetings, they may experience a caller's voice breaking up or cutting in and out of a call or meeting. Shared video may freeze or pixelate, or fail altogether. This is due to the IP packets that represent voice and video traffic encountering network congestion and arriving out of sequence or not at all. If this happens (or to prevent it from happening in the first place), use Quality of Service (QoS).

With QoS, you prioritize delay-sensitive network traffic (for example, voice or video streams), allowing it to "cut in line" in front of traffic that is less sensitive (like downloading a new app, where an extra second to download isn't a big deal). QoS identifies and marks all packets in real-time streams using Windows Group Policy Objects and a routing feature called Port-based Access Control Lists, which instructs your network to give voice, video, and screen sharing their own dedicated network bandwidth.

Ideally, you'll implement QoS on your internal network while getting ready to roll out Teams, but you can do it anytime. If you're small enough, you might not need QoS.

When you're ready, read Implement Quality of Service (QoS) in Microsoft Teams.

To use QoS to manage meeting traffic, read Set how you want to handle real-time media traffic for Teams meetings.

Set up call analytics

Use Call Analytics to troubleshoot poor call quality

Set up CQD

Manage call and meeting quality in Teams

Teams Troubleshooting