Has anyone had great success limiting bandwidth for Skype?

[NetworkingGuy]

It seems I'm trying to solve a Skype or hosting issue rather than a bandwidth issue. 

Our network uses Skype for Business and I believe the server to be setup incorrectly not managing any users bandwidth. From what I can tell this has caused some of our users to use more than 12 GB a day which seems like a lot and it is filling up or circuits. 

My initial thought was just rate limit Skype traffic using the Traffic Shaping Tools but I was not certain if that would work. Has anyone been in a similar situation where they ended up successfully using Meraki to manage Skype traffic?

[Adam]

I've used it to limit YouTube traffic successfully.  I haven't tried with Skype but it seems like that would be a good place to start.  Many platforms will gobble up more traffic for HD streams when its available.  

[NetworkingGuy]

Yeah, I'm seeing that. I have some content filters in place now and was looking into AD filters for the future. I was going to add a few more things to it and noticed Skype. I can't block that as its a critical business function.

I'm fairly certain the server is horribly misconfigured and no QoS or Bandwidth Policy was put in place; nor proper links or whatever for sites. If Meraki can buy me time to redo all of that that's the goal. 

My concern is Skype seems to note what it has available in terms of bandwidth so will it see my rate limit when I put that on or will it only see the whole link like it does now? This would be a problem if for whatever reason Skype tried to shove 100 Mbps down a 10 Mbps limit.

Supposedly if you set it up right it does its own thing ensuring its features are optimal on limited circuits. I see no reason though why without a limit I have like 80 Mbps in Skype on a 100 Mbps circuit. We don't even have 50 Skype clients at any location.  

[PhilipDAth]

What is the user doing that is using a lot of bandwidth?  Video? File sharing?

If it is video you may effectively cripple them.  If you don't want them using video it should be disabled on the server.

A lot of the Cisco Spark functionality is *free*.  Once you use it you wont want to go back to Skype for Business.

https://www.webex.com/products/teams/index.html

So you know what I think the best way to solve the Skype for Business problem is.  Replace it with something better.

[NinoBrugioni]

As a starting point, you'll need to profile your traffic mix, you should know what type of function you use skype for :-

Voice,

Video,

Messaging

etc, etc

Repeat this for a cross section of users so you get a general picture across the business.

The Microsoft site will tell you what the bandwidth requirement is for each type and you can then extrapolate the bandwidth for a given traffic profile.

Apply some QOS to match not forgetting to factor some growth/ spike into the equation.

Nino

[NetworkingGuy]

That's about what I was thinking. Thanks for the confirmation @NinoBrugioni.