Managed and unmanaged switch

[milon03]

Hello

 

Can you please share how your network setup if you are running VOIP, it would be usefull. Let me explain our situation

 

We are running alcatel SIP phones which is on its own vlan. We have several vlans(data, voice, wireless) running on the network. Most of the switches are managed hp procurve. But we have few unmanaged switches in different areas which basically extending few extra network points. All the cabinets are connected with fibre. Now call quality of all internal calls fine. Occationally we having issues with external calls. It is always the external end cannot hear us properly(robotic noise). We can always hear from our end fine for those calls. It was all working ok until recently even though there were occational call drop issues.

 

Those who are using VOIP in your place do you have all managed switches or a mixture of few unmanaged 4/8 port little switches? How a mixture of manage and unmanaged switch connection should behave on the network? To my understanding if we move to all managed switch the over all network performance would improve but not 100% convince that it would resolve the current call quality issue to external call.

 

Please share your experience.

 

Thanks

 

Milon

[win]

Sounds like you have a bottleneck. I had that problem and solved it by running another cable to the main backbone switch (to spread traffic across different cables)

[Blue_Cookeh]

I think your first port of call on call quality issues would be to use your phone systems logging/reporting functionality to monitor latency, jitter, and packet loss (not sure how to do this on Alcatel, on Avaya and Cisco there are menu options on the phones themselves to monitor it).

 

Unmanaged switches aren't ideal for VoIP but I'm not convinced this would solve your issues if there isn't much traffic passing over them.

[jamesfed]

Given its only external calls that are having issues I would be getting in touch with the ISP.

 

Are you sharing both voice and data down the both line (be it FTTC/Leased Line/suchlike) - if so then worth checking if the ISP is applying QoS to the line.

[pete]

I'd be talking to the people responsible for your outbound line after checking jitter/latency by looking at your phone system as mentioned up thread.

 

I'd also try to narrow down to whether it's specific external numbers you have problems on. We have a few suppliers with incredibly shonky phone systems (the sales guys are always complaining about the phones) where call quality is awful.

 

Internally we run managed switches for voice (I refuse to provide voice ports on dumb switches).

[bigrob2212]

I would suggest it is a Quality of Service (QoS) issue. Ideally all switches on a VOIP network should be capable of QoS and so prioritise the voice data packets. I would imagine that the lower spec unmanaged switches don't have QoS.

[milon03]

It is not any specific phone numbers and qos already applied on managed switches