Working from home is great, that is until everyone needs to use the Wi-Fi for homework/streaming/gaming etc and you’re attempting to join that all-important 9am Monday morning Teams call.
Here’s how to take back control of your network, and guarantee you’ll always have a great experience in Microsoft Teams calls, even on congested home Wi-Fi networks.
Configure QoS or Priority on your home Wi-Fi network
With everyone fighting for bandwidth at home, you need to ensure that your Teams traffic is prioritised over your network.
You can achieve this by configuring QoS – or Quality of Service on your home router.
QoS is a way of marking certain traffic on your network, and giving it priority over everything else – a bit like an express lane on the highway.
To configure this, you’ll need find your home routers IP address (it’s unique number on your network) on the network, and then login to your home routers configuration page.
Locating your home router’s IP address
Here’s how to find your home router’s IP:
- Click the network icon (either Wi-Fi or Ethernet) in the lower right corner of your screen
- Click Properties under the name of your home Wi-Fi network in the list (mine’s Lumiere-5G)
- In the window that appears, scroll to the bottom and look for IPv4 DNS Servers – make a note of the address that appears here
- Open your web browser, and browse to that address
- Login with your router’s default admin username and password. You may find these written on a label on the bottom of your router. If not, try admin / admin
- Once logged in, look for Bandwidth Control, or QoS, or similar. Your router may label this as something else. On my router, it’s labelled as Bandwidth Control
- Within the Bandwidth Control section (or however its labelled on your router), add the following information:
Port Start Port End Priority DSCP Marking Up Bandwidth (Min/Max) Down Bandwidth (Min/Max) 50,000 50,019 1 46 32/192 Kbps 32/192 Kbps 50,020 50.039 2 34 1024/5120 Kbps 1024/5120 Kbps 50,040 50,059 3 18 1024/5120 Kbps 1024/5120 Kbps
Note that your router may not accept all of these values (such as DSCP Markings). My home router only requires Port Start & End, Priority and Up/Down bandwidth min/max
8. Be sure to save your changes. Your router may require a reboot to apply these changes. Keep in mind that doing so will drop your household Internet for 2-3 minutes.
That’s it! Your Teams traffic will now be prioritised on your home network!
A Note on Microsoft Teams ports
The above steps assume that your Office 365 administrator hasn’t changed the default ports used with Microsoft Teams. The vast majority never change these ports, but keep this in mind if you don’t seem to see any improvements.
If you’d like to read more on this, Microsoft have documented the process here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/qos-in-teams