EP 62: Understanding Microsoft Teams Call Health

Transcript for this Episode:

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SANTI: Welcome to another episode of Tech UNMUTED. Today, we're going to look at trying to figure out how you can look at the health of your Team's call, whether it's audio or video. Listen, having a good experience with your audio and video while you're on Microsoft Teams matters more now than ever before because it's become like the mainstay for video conferencing and conference calls in general.

Have you ever been on that Team's call and get that notification that just pops up from the top of your screen? The one that says, "Hey, you're currently experiencing poor network quality and it may impact your call." That one, yes. What do you do? What do you do when this thing pops up on your screen? Have you ever been to the Call Health section in Teams? If you have been there, can you make out what all these different types of analytics mean? We're going to cover all that today.

Inside of Microsoft Teams, there is this option called Call Health. You can find it by clicking on the three dots at the top of your toolbar, and then you go to Settings and click on Call Health. It gives you four types of metrics. It gives you a network metric, it gives you an audio metric, a video metric, and a screen-sharing metric. Four metrics. It tells you what's going on with within each of these sections and all these metrics.

Really, if what the metrics mean, then you can possibly troubleshoot it. If you don't know, it doesn't really help. Today, I want to see if we can provide you guys information with how to understand these metrics. Let's jump right into it. Again, you click on the three dots where it says More on the top of the toolbar, go to Settings, and then go to Call Health.

The first metric you're going to see is the network metric. Inside the network metric, there are specific indicators that are critical. The first one is round-trip time. Round-trip time measures the time it takes for data to travel, guess what, from your device to the server and then back again. Hence, round-trip. The lower the number, the lower the number, the better off you are. Typically, anything under 200 milliseconds is considered a pretty good round-trip metric. There's your first one. 200 milliseconds or less, that means that your round-trip metric is performing well. Once it starts to go above that, you may have a problem in your network.

The next metric you're going to see is what's called Packet Lost. Packet just means basically data is sent over the Internet in what's called packets. Almost like a little package. Sometimes, some of those packets get lost along the way. Ideally, your packet loss should be less than 2%. If you have high packet loss, you're going to absolutely have poor audio and video quality. It's going to cause interruptions. It's even going to cause garbled communication. That's no good. If you start, if people come across as garbled or a video freezing, you need to look at your packet loss percentage. Again, below 2% should give you a good performance. That's a good indicator. Anything above that, you're going to have a problem. Jitter. I love explaining jitter. Jitter refers to the variation in packet arrival time. They're not lost. They're just not coming in at a consistent basis. Some of it gets delayed.

Here's what it sounds like. Ready? It sounds like this, "Hi. I'm here to-- about the-- [laughs] That's jitter. Because they're coming in at different variations, you start getting these breaks into your communication. Less than 30 milliseconds would be ideal to avoid having that choppy audio and video issue. Those are your three indicators inside the network metrics that you really want to keep an eye on. Again, round-trip, anything underneath 200 milliseconds should be good. Packet loss, anything below 2% should be good. Jitter, should be below 30 milliseconds.

Let's move on to audio metrics. The voice you hear. Under the audio metric, you're going to have a couple indicators. One of them is the bitrate. That one's an important one. Bitrate, this is the amount of data transmitted per second during an audio session. That's it. It's a per second. Higher bitrates generally means you have a better audio quality. However, too high of a bitrate on a poor network could lead to buffering delay. You see, it's a balancing act. While you want a high bitrate, you also want that on a good network. That's why you have the network metric and the audio metric side-by-side because everything is a balancing act.

Typically, for standard audio calls, a bitrate of around 50 to 100 kilobits per second is good. For better audio calls like HD type audio or probably more like streaming, like you're streaming music, those types of calls or that type of audio, you're going to need more clarity. You're probably looking at a bitrate of a 100 to 150 kilobits per second. That's usually what you want. For standard stuff like right now I'm just talking to you guys, 50 to 100 kilobits per second should be good. That's the bitrate. Remember, yes, higher is better but higher on a poor network is bad because the network can't handle it.

Then we have audio codec. That's the next metric you have. What it is there's different, let's call them formats. There's different formats that are used to encode and decode audio. There's different formats. Opus, for example, typically used for high-quality voice communications on a wide band. If you're using Opus, and that's spelled O-P-U-S, then your bitrate typically is going to be from 6 kilobits to 510 kilobits per second. We're in the voice business, meaning in the telecommunications business. We have a lot of telephony infrastructure. A lot of times, we'll use G.711 or even G.722, compressed, uncompressed. G.711 would be uncompressed.

Typically, for G.711, you want a bitrate of 64 kilobits per second. If you're using G.722, you still want about a bitrate of 64 kilobits per second. It's about the same. It's just that one is suitable for high-definition voice applications, commonly found in VoIP systems. Voice over IP. The other one, it's uncompressed, but it's known for having low latency and simplicity. That's the G.711. In either case, it all depends on what audio codec your provider is using. If you're using Microsoft Teams with a voice provider, like Fusion Connect, for example, there'll be a codec that they use. That's probably going to be either G.722 or G.711.

Anyway, moving on down to the video metric, because that's the next one on the list. Under video metrics, you have two things you have to deal with. Remember when I said that in audio, you had this bitrate? In video, you have a frame rate, because video is perceived by the human eye in frames. When you see a movement on your screen, it's actually multiple images that are being displayed one after the other. That gives you the sense that things are moving. That's how that works. That is a frame rate. Frame rate indicates how many frames per second are being sent to you so that your eye can capture. A high frame rate will result in a smoother video. Again, very much like the audio, if you're trying to do a high frame rate on a poor network, now the network is not going to be able to handle it. You're going to have a bad experience. It's a balancing act. Everything, when it comes to network, audio, and video working together, it's like a balancing act.

When it comes to frame rate specifically, for good quality video, 15, and that's on the low end, to 30 frames per second is typical. I like 30. Whenever I can on internet type calls like these, I like to use 30 frames per second. Here's the thing, though. While frame rate is how many frames you see, the resolution that you use for your video could also impact the performance of the video. For example, think resolution as the clarity of the video. How pixelated do I look versus how sharp do I look? That's really what resolution comes down to. Guess like in anything else, a higher resolution means you get what? A much more clear image. Guess what? You guessed it, it requires more bandwidth.

This is why network is so critical. You got to have a good-performing network. That's why the first metric is always going to be network. Because a lot of times, your bad experience on Microsoft Teams is probably going to be a network. Because all these other things are trying to compete for that bandwidth. Anyway, resolution could be, for example, it's measured in pixels. That's why you see sometimes 720p, that p stands for pixels, or 1080p, that p stands for pixels. Standard definition video, this is very basic standard definition, it's not going to be very sharp, that's about 480 pixels. For 480 pixels, you're going to need a bitrate, same as audio, there's a bitrate here.

A bitrate of about 500 kilobits per second to 1.5 megabits per second. Typically, that's our standard video. As you move up though, you're going to see the numbers go up. Let's go to the next one. We go from 480 pixels to 720 pixels. 720 is considered high definition. It's not considered full high def, but it is considered high definition. At 720, you're going to need a bitrate of, you pick up what you left off, 1.5 megabits to 4 megabits per second is recommended, somewhere in there. As you can see now, you're starting to eat away at the bandwidth. The higher the resolution, the more bandwidth you're going to need. That's just how that works.

Then let's just go up to the next common resolution, which is the 1080p or pixels. Typically, they'll call that full HD. For full HD, you're going to want a bitrate of 3 to 8 megabits per second. That's like your standard there. It all comes down to what's the quality of the audio and video that you want to send to your audience and do you have the network bandwidth to manage that? Because when you add audio and video, you're adding these things. It's a math problem. It's an addition. If I turn off my video right now, for example, my bandwidth opens up because I'm no longer streaming video, and so I don't need to worry about the frame rate or the resolution. All that bandwidth gets freed up. It adds on, basically.

Something that we don't think about much is the screen sharing. I know. Everybody talks about audio and video. Guess what? When you share your screen, that's another image you're sending. Because remember, typically when you share a screen, your video is still off to the side and then your screen is being projected also on the screen. It works with frame rates as well, just like video. It's all frame rates. It's very similar. It's measured the same way. 15 frames per second, this would be sufficient for a static presentation. That PowerPoint that's just sitting there, and every now and then you flip towards the next slide, 15 frames per second, good to go.

If you're playing dynamic content, things that are moving like I'm moving right now, but I'm not a slide. If I was sharing my screen and my screen had dynamic content like a video or some type of real-time demonstration or something, you're looking for that 30 frames per second as far as a frame rate goes for screen sharing. Before I tell you how to troubleshoot some of these things, I'm going to do a quick recap, just to give you the metrics that matter. Network, round trip, 200 milliseconds or less, you're good to go. Packet loss, this is under the network metrics. Below 2%, good to go. Jitter. If it's less than 30 milliseconds, good to go.

Those are the three things you look at when you're looking at your network. By the way, that's probably where most of your issues are going to lie. On the audio, it depends on what kind of audio you're providing, but it could be anywhere from 50 to 150 kilobits per second, depending on what audio you want to transmit. If it's streaming music or if it's just somebody talking. Then video metrics. If you can shoot for 30 frames per second, you're going to get much smoother movements. For screen sharing, if it's just a static presentation, 15 frames per second should be good. Unless you play some movie or dynamic content.

To wrap it up, let me just tell you quickly. If you are experiencing issues with your Microsoft Teams call. The first thing you probably want to do is check all your cables. Yes, I know. If you're connected to a WiFi, you can try switching from WiFi to an Ethernet cable because you get faster speeds, usually. It's called full-duplex versus half-duplex. It basically means that on a Ethernet cable, you can send and receive data at the same time, whereas over a Wi-Fi connection, you can only send or receive data, but not at the same time. It tends to work better. Check that, check if your cables are damaged.

Sometimes, believe it or not, simply restarting your computer fixes the problem because a lot of times it's just something that's jamming up your RAM or your memory in the computer. If that doesn't do it, try restarting your router. Your connectivity issues a lot of times will clear out when you restart your router. Something that folks don't think about is using the latest version of Microsoft Teams because Microsoft will make updates that will often fix bugs. If you're not updating your Teams, you can run into a problem there, too. Think about that. Finally, make sure that the drivers that you're using for your camera and your microphone are up to date.

Same thing, like you want to update your Teams, you want to update your drivers because they do update these things to fix bugs and make things work better. Anyway, that is just a quick podcast on how to understand the Call Health metrics and Teams. Now you know the numbers, so next time you're having a challenge, you can say, "Ah, let me go check my Call Health, and you'll know what to look for." Then, hopefully, some of these troubleshooting tips I just gave you at the end can help you get back on track. Until next time folks, stay connected, stay curious. See y'all next time.

CLOSING VOICEOVER: Thanks for diving into the tech world with us today. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon to never miss an episode of Tech UNMUTED. Stay curious, stay connected.

Episode Credits:

Produced by: Fusion Connect