How Much Data Does Microsoft Teams Use?

This tool calculates how much data and bandwidth is required by Teams

Calculator

To use it enter

• Amount of time spent on meetings with Voice or Video
• Number of users
  • Default value of 1 for a single user
  • Any number (useful if you’re a network administrator looking to plan bandwidth requirements for your organization)
• Number of calls made (default value of 1). Use a value of 30 to calculate monthly data usage.

The tool will provide the total bandwidth and data used with the desired units.

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Example Calculations

A one minute Teams voice meeting with a single user consumes 1.14 Megabytes. Two users simply doubles that number to 2.28 MB. By comparison a one minute video call uses 60 MB of data.

A one minute Teams video meeting with a single user consumes 60 MB.

A one hour Teams video call uses 60 MB * 60 minutes = 3600 MB or 3.6 Gigabytes of data.

Background

Teams bandwidth consumption depends on whether it is a voice or video meeting and the app settings. In this tool we have used Microsoft’s recommendation for the best performance settings.

Who needs this tool?

This tool can be used for many different applications

• To answer the question – what SIM card do I need to purchase when I’m traveling?
• Planning an organization’s network requirements. Is there a cap on the data provided and what should that number be?

Data Consumption vs Bandwidth

A question that comes up often is – what’s the difference between data usage, and bandwidth consumption.

Data usage as the term suggests, measures the total amount of data consumed when you’re using a mobile device (laptop, tablet, phone).

When you download a PDF file for example that’s 5 MB in size, the total data downloaded is 5 MB. It may be a little more in practice due to overhead that’s associated with data packets used to carry that information.

The quality of streaming video on the other hand can be reduced over a lower speed link and therefore the total size of the file corresponding to a video clip for instance can be lower.

Units for data usage: kilobytes (kB), Megabytes (MB), Terabytes (TB).

Bandwidth is a measure of how fast data is transferred to your mobile device. A larger bandwidth number indicates faster data transport.

Microsoft provides requirements for Teams. The table below shows requirements for one-on-one audio and video meetings

It indicates a minimum bandwidth of 10 kbps both on the uplink and downlink for one-on-one audio calls. For best performance the network speed should be 76 kbps in both directions.

For comparison the best video call requires 4000 kbps in both up and down directions. This is over 50 times the bandwidth required for a voice call.

Something to remember when you’re in a high speed train where it’s difficult to get a high speed cellular connection or in situations where you don’t have an unlimited wireless data plan.

⭐ Please use our coupon SPECIAL5 to receive an additional 5% discount on your purchase ⭐

Related Calculators

How do other applications compare when it comes to data usage and bandwidth requirements?

Compare the data use and bandwidth with

• WhatsApp
• Zoom

Microsoft Teams Data Consumption Table

The following table shows the data use for a single user in Megabytes for Voice and Video calling.