Prepare your organization's network for Microsoft Teams

Teams combines three forms of traffic:

• Data traffic between the Office 365 online environment and the Teams client (signaling, presence, chat, file upload and download, OneNote synchronization).

• Peer-to-peer real-time communications traffic (audio, video, desktop sharing).

• Conferencing real-time communications traffic (audio, video, desktop sharing).

This impacts the network on two levels: traffic will flow between the Microsoft Teams clients directly for peer-to-peer scenarios, and traffic will flow between the Office 365 environment and the Microsoft Teams clients for meeting scenarios. To ensure optimal traffic flow, traffic must be allowed to flow both between the internal network segments (for example, between sites over the WAN) as well as between the network sites and Office 365. Not opening the correct ports or actively blocking specific ports will lead to a degraded experience.

To get an optimal experience with real-time media within Microsoft Teams, your network must meet the networking requirements for Office 365. For more information, see Media Quality and Network Connectivity Performance for Skype for Business Online.

For the two defining network segments (Client to Microsoft Edge and Customer Edge to Microsoft Edge), consider the following recommendations.

* The latency metric targets assume your company site or sites and the Microsoft edges are on the same continent.

Your company site connection to the Microsoft network edge includes first hop network access, which can be WiFi or another wireless technology.

The network performance targets assume proper bandwidth and/or QoS planning. In other words, the requirements apply directly to Teams real-time media traffic when the network connection is under a peak load.

For more help with preparing your network for Teams, check out Network Planner.

Bandwidth requirements

Microsoft Teams gives you the best audio, video and content sharing experience regardless of your network conditions. With variable codecs, media can be negotiated in limited bandwidth environments with minimal impact. But where bandwidth is not a concern, experiences can be optimized for quality, including up to 1080p video resolution, up to 30fps for video and 15fps for content, and high-fidelity audio.

This article describes a concise version of how bandwidth is utilized by Teams real-time audio, video, and desktop sharing modalities in various use cases. Teams is always conservative on bandwidth utilization and can deliver HD video quality in under 1.2Mbps. The actual bandwidth consumption in each audio/video call or meeting will vary based on several factors, such as video layout, video resolution, and video frames per second. When more bandwidth is available, quality and usage will increase to deliver the best experience.

Additional network considerations

External Name Resolution

Ensure that all the client computers running Teams client can resolve external DNS queries to discover the services provided by Office 365, and that your firewalls are not preventing access. For information about configuring firewall ports, go to Office 365 URLs and IP ranges.

NAT Pool Size

When multiple users/devices access Office 365 using Network Address Translation (NAT) or Port Address Translation (PAT), you need to ensure that the devices hidden behind each publicly routable IP address do not exceed the supported number.

To mitigate this risk, ensure adequate Public IP addresses are assigned to the NAT pools to prevent port exhaustion. Port exhaustion will cause internal end-users and devices to face issues when connecting to the Office 365 services. For more information, see NAT support with Office 365.

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Guidance

If your environment has an Intrusion Detection and/or Prevention System (IDS/IPS) deployed for an extra layer of security for outbound connections, ensure that any traffic with destination to Office 365 URLs is whitelisted.

Network health determination

When planning on the implementation of Microsoft Teams within your network, you must ensure you have the required bandwidth, you have access to all required IP addresses, the correct ports opened, and you are meeting the performance requirements for real-time media.

If you know you will not meet these criteria, your end users will not get an optimal experience from Teams due to bad quality during calls and meetings.

Should you not meet these criteria, this is the time to consider pausing the project to ensure you meet the criteria before continuing.

	Decision Point	Have you evaluated your network capabilities for supporting real time media? If your network has not been properly assessed, or you know it will not support real time media, will you disable video and screen sharing capabilities to reduce network impact and poor Teams experiences?
	Next Steps	Network Quality Unknown: Perform a Network Readiness Assessment to determine if your network is ready for Real Time Media. Network Quality Poor: Perform network remediation steps to provide a proper environment for high quality Real Time Media. Network Satisfactory: Ensure all IP addresses and ports are properly accessible.

Related Topics

Video: Network Planning

Source

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/prepare-network