We are having performance issues with Skype for Business. We have two staff who skype weekly. One lives in Boise and the here on site. We are using Skype for Business. They both have high-end computers with plenty of horse power. We have 100 Mbps fiber and a gig backbone internally. they very often get “Bad network Quality” message when they hover over the connection status bars. the result is the video hangs but audio is still fine. I’ve suggested skyping at a different time of day. i thought maybe the skype servers had more traffic at certain times of the day. I’m at a loss. it’s critical that they are able to skype successfully.
What type of firewalls are you using? I found a problem with video traffic through our Sophos firewall. Traffic was being detected and flagged as a flood attack. The offending device was a video encoder that was uploading video to Vimeo. Bizarre. We had previously had trouble with Skype as well, in the same way you had described. I can’t confirm that the firewall did the trick (because we also recently switched ISP’s) but Skype is now crystal clear.
Does anyone know if you can prioritize Skype traffic on your lan/wan like you would VoIP?
We have Watchguard Firewall. I’ll check it out.
thanks
Sometimes bad connections are related to DPI or any other rules that evaluate encrypted traffic. Some people relieve it through bypass rules on the ports used by Skype for Business/Lync (scroll down a bit and it will show ports used for audio/video):
after further testing this happens only with Skype for Business and not Skype personal.
I know that you can prioritize, and that Meraki has default application settings to do it. I imagine there’s a way to do it for other systems as well:
@Chewy121756 I wonder if there’s a way to exempt a specific client from the rules you currently have applied? Like, can you create a rule that exempts traffic scanning from a particular IP? Give it a static assignment and exempt it from everything you can (give it high priority on all shaping for all traffic, exempt checks for firewall rules, exempt content filter, etc), then try it again? That will say for sure if the Firewall is the issue or not, which I honestly imagine it is.
Skype is a very resilient service, and as a result of how it operates, it can often be categorized as P2P traffic, like torrents. Check the logs and traffic shaping rules for P2P stuff and see if that resolves it?
Here’s a few other things that might affect your call quality:
- Make sure you have a strong WiFi signal , or if possible, use a wired connection .
- If the internet connection degrades during the call, Skype may turn off one or more video streams in group calls. Once the internet connection recovers, Skype will automatically turn the video back on.
- If you’re having connections issues in Windows, you can follow the troubleshooting steps in [Why can’t I get online].
- Close any applications that could be interfering with your call. File sharing applications, streaming audio or video, or even just having a browser open are all things that can eat up bandwidth.
- If you’re using Skype on a laptop and you’re in power-saving mode, try plugging the laptop into AC power or switching it to maximum performance mode.
1 Like