Teams & Gmeet issue - Freezing / Poor Sound Quality

[smalldragoon]

Hi All,
V 25.7.10

I'm posting here to try to get suggestions on some quality issues when I so Teams & G-Meet visios. FYI, I have as well some issues watching videos from some online videos ( not Youtube or netflix as I would say they have a good buffering ..)

I'm using Fiber. Searching on the forum, there was some advices to enable Qos. I have done the config ( I'm joining bufferloat test screenshot) I'm A and you can see as well network bandwith available.

How to reproduce : the behavior is not consistent in time. After X minutes, the quality of the sound decrease ( voice robot ) or the connection is completly lost. After around 10 sec, reconnection, and the session is good again.
-> nothing in the firewall logs on rules
-> no reason of any blocking / bad rules as it would not connect
-> no reason for IPS issue as it would not connect at all ( right ? )

Any insight ? known behavior ? something ? I do not see anything as no bad logs to troubleshoot .
If you need more info, let me know
Thanks in advance
 

[OPNenthu]

You are seeing the same even without shaping?

I was skimming through this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/microsoft-teams-online-call-flows

Saw a note under the section "Technologies that aren't recommended with Microsoft Teams":

Packet shapers. Any kind of packet snipper, packet inspection, or packet shaper devices aren't recommended for Teams media traffic and may degrade quality significantly.

Interesting.

There are also several issues on the OPNsense GH related to fragmentation (some closed, some not) so maybe this is rearing its ugly head again.  A little out of my depth, though.

[connervt]

Saw a note under the section "Technologies that aren't recommended with Microsoft Teams":

Packet shapers. Any kind of packet snipper, packet inspection, or packet shaper devices aren't recommended for Teams media traffic and may degrade quality significantly.

Interesting.

You could also read that as Microsoft saying "Don't do anything that prevents us from having complete control of your system..."

[OPNenthu]

Perhaps :) I read it as "You can accept the baseline so that we don't have to troubleshoot your network."

I sooner suspect problems with either IPv6 fragmentation or UDP packet drops, tbh.  It's been a theme and the FreeBSD kernel is getting worked on to make pf play well with pfil() hooks requiring the entire packet which is a problem under IPv6.  Or something like that.

I'm only halfway through this explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtSg6ylDALo

Also need to re-read this: https://github.com/opnsense/src/issues/254

[connervt]

Perhaps :) I read it as "You can accept the baseline so that we don't have to troubleshoot your network."

My post was tongue in cheek.  You are correct, initial troubleshooting should disable any shaping and packet inspection to determine if they are impacting the situation.

[nero355]

You could also read that as Microsoft saying "Don't do anything that prevents us from having complete control of your system..."

My post was tongue in cheek.

You are not far away from the truth tho...

** Cough **
TCPA/Palladium/TPM chip/Pluton chip/etc...
** Cough **

;)

[smalldragoon]

Hi everyone,
I set the traffic shaping as a potential solution I found in the forum but at first, I had no traffic shaping and it was exatcly same behavior and issue. Would paquet fragmentation be an issue ?

[OPNenthu]

Would paquet fragmentation be an issue ?

I don't know if Teams is sensitive to it, but would you be willing to try something?

https://github.com/opnsense/src/issues/254#issuecomment-3650061623

Franco has provided a vanilla FreeBSD 15 kernel which includes a potential fix for the IPv6 fragmentation, but excludes OPNsense patches. It comes with this disclaimer:

Keep in mind the kernel provided is a vanilla one and is missing at least one crucial patch set to allow ipfw and pf to coexist so for us that means policy routing + shaper combinations are not working as expected (policy routing works but hides the traffic from the shaper).

Install with:
# opnsense-update -zkr 15.0 -a FreeBSD:15:amd64

I don't have Teams presently but I do use IPv6 and I also have streaming issues sometimes.  I might try it myself in a bit when the family is offline.  Will just need to take a ZFS snapshot for rollback and disable shaping.

[stanps]

Well I'm not sure if this would compatible with your network configuration, but this worked very well for me.

https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=50768.0