When planning connectivity and data flow for Teams, you need to first determine if you'll be deploying audio, video, and/or meetings. After determining which features you expect to deploy and use, you can take steps to optimize the network, so that it can properly support that functionality. 

While Teams uses codecs, which are specific audio and video technologies to adapt to most network conditions, it's important to prepare the network for Teams to ensure optimal performance. 

There are three major risk areas that can affect how Teams users perceive network quality. They include bandwidth availability, firewall and proxy blockers, and other network issues such as jitter and packet loss. 

Let's talk a little bit about how to prepare your network to ensure happy users. 

Although Microsoft Teams adapts to network conditions to provide the best possible audio, video, and content sharing experience, such experiences can be optimized for quality. By properly planning bandwidth for connectivity and data flow, Teams can deliver up 1080p video resolution, up to 30 frames per second for video, and 15 frames per second for content, as well as high-fidelity audio. 

The table that you see on your screen shows the necessary bandwidth that's required on a per scenario basis. 

As you can see, peer-to-peer audio calling is optimal when you can make 30 kilobytes per second available in both directions. When leveraging screen sharing with audio calling, it's best to ensure that there is at least 130 kilobytes per second available up and down. 

If you climb the features ladder and once you offer functionality that includes peer-to-peer HD quality video calling at 1080p and 30fps, you're going to need to ensure that there's at least 1.5 megabytes per second available both up and down. 

Now of course, actual bandwidth consumption in all scenarios will vary based on several factors including video layout, resolution, and frames per second. The more bandwidth that is made available, obviously, the better the quality will be. 

Because Microsoft Teams connects to Microsoft online services, reliable internet connectivity is a must. TCP ports 80 and 443 must be open from the clients to the internet and UDP ports 3478 through 3481 must be open from the the clients to the internet. 

The TCP ports in this case are used to connect to web-based content like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and the Teams Chat services. Various connectors and plugins also connect over these ports. The UDP ports are used to ensure audio and video flow correctly. 

These port requirements are critical to a reliable Teams deployment. Blocking these ports puts you in an unsupported configuration and will also affect media quality for users. 

It should also come as no surprise that you need to limit network impairments if you wish to maintain user satisfaction. 

Typical network impairments include latency, packet loss, and jitter. 

Latency refers to the time that it takes for an IP packet to get from point A to point B on the network. Generally speaking, this delay is often related to the physical distance between points A and B, and the speed of light. Latency can be measured as one way or as round trip time. 

Packet loss is generally defined as the percentage of packets that are lost in a given time window. Packet loss is the mortal enemy of audio quality, although small individual loss packets may have a negligible affect on audio, back-to-back burst losses can cause audio to cut out completely. 

Jitter refers to the average change in delay between success of packets. While Teams can adapt to some levels of jitter through buffering, excessive jitter can result in users seeing the effects. 

After you've wrapped up planning and network preparation, you should test network performance before deploying anything. The Skye for Business Network Assessment Tool can be used to test if the network is ready for Teams. The assessment tool tests whether all necessary ports have been opened and it tests for network impairments. 

To wrap things up, regarding Teams, let's consider some of the main takeaways. 

When planning for Teams, be sure that you open TCP ports 80 and 443 outgoing from clients that will be using Teams. UDP ports 3478 through 3481 should also be opened outgoing from clients that will use Teams. In addition, be sure that there is sufficient bandwidth for deploying Teams and that you run the assessment tool to ensure your network meets the Teams requirements.