However, it is recommended to give this type of traffic a lower priority than your audio queue because a call without audio is significantly worse than one where your video is just freezing from time to time. In addition, you can give a priority queue to video so you can prioritize this type of traffic as well. As you will see in the picture below, by placing audio traffic in a priority queue your routers will know to prioritize your audio traffic above other types of traffic when there isn’t enough bandwidth to send all the traffic through. If you only have a limited amount of bandwidth, QoS is highly recommended so you can prioritize your audio and video traffic above other types of traffic. Quality of Service is great in that it allows you to prioritize different traffic types. By providing a more direct route to Office 365 this not only helps the customer by reducing the number of network hops but also the ISP by allowing them to save more bandwidth on their resources. Since this is not the optimal route, the customer should try to work with the ISP to provide a more direct path to the Office 365 network (as illustrated by the dark blue arrow). However, with each additional hop through the ISP’s network comes additional delay. From there, the traffic will continue to go from hop to hop until it reaches the Office 365 network (as illustrated by the orange arrows). If our customer wants to connect to the Office 365 network, first they send the traffic out their edge router to the first hop which is a router in the ISP’s network. In addition, there are several other things connected to your ISP including (but not limited to): Internet Exchanges, other ISP’s, other cloud services, and finally the Office 365 network. On the left hand side of this picture you’ll see we have a customer using a Teams client and their router that will route traffic to the internet. To illustrate this, take a look at the picture below. Well, to put it as simply as possible, the internet that we use on a daily basis is just a huge network of routers that route traffic to/from one another. However, we haven’t fully explained what those peering points were and how they worked. You may remember from the last blog where we discussed how you connect to the Office 365 network by leveraging the Microsoft peering points to ensure the best connection. So without further ado let’s jump right in! What is peering? How does it work? In this article, we’ll discuss peering, QoS, and some tools to assist you in planning your network for Microsoft Teams. Welcome back to the last blog in the “Plan Your Network in Microsoft Teams” series! Last time we talked about the process of connecting to Office 365 over the internet.