MS Ignite BRK3128 - Media Quality in Office 365 Skype for Business

As promised in my Microsoft Ignite 2015 - Sessions, Venue, Expo post, here comes the second summary / review of the Ignite Skype4B sessions.

Presented by Sasa Juratovic and Aaron Miller, both from the Skype Enterprise Engineering team at Microsoft.

The presentation started out with a good voice quality demo of "good" network conditions compared to "bad" network conditions (10% bursty packet loss.) Requirements on a regular data network is not the same as requirements on a Real-Time Media network.

The same 3 issues as discussed in BRK3110 were discussed again:

Latency
The time it takes the packet to get from A to B. When talking about networks this is usually round trip time and noted as network latency.

Jitter
The amount of time the packets are delayed before processing to compensate for packets arriving later than other packets. This time gets added to the network latency.

Packet loss
The amount of packages that never survived the trip from A to B, got malformed, or simply arrived outside of the jitter buffer.

And added to list of issue were:

Audio and Video Glitching,
which is caused by the end user environment, the system or devices.

Call Quality Methodology, can be used even though using Skype 4B Online from Office 365. The main difference is that Microsoft will manage the servers and the network between the servers.

ExpressRoute 3.1 is Skype for Business ready and can be used to get QoS between your clients and Office 365, coming in the near future.

A new version of the Lync Bandwidth calculator for Skype for business Online were demonstrated, this will be realeased further on. Will it support SILK? (a good question at the end of the session)

Some best practices

• You need a QoS strategy, and you need to monitor your network.
• Make sure firewalls and proxies are configured: Office 365 URLs and IP address ranges
• Don't run your laptop on battery but try to be power connected for the duration of the call.
• Use the Lync PreCall Diagnostics Tool before an important call to assess network quality

Some tools

• Wireshark - Look for packet loss or failed connections
• pathping -4 sipdir.online.lync.com
• tracert -4 -d sipdir.online.lync.com
• Client Logs and Snooper