IP Phones and VOIP Network Issues

[JATSO]

One of my schools used their current supplier to switch to IP phones, cost quite bit, had nothing but problems with the call quality and dropouts of calls.

 

Our ISP applied QoS on the smoothwall device in the school and it seemed to fix it just before Christmas but the issues seems to have come back, they have Netgear Smart Switches but I think company used a cheap Netgear POE switch to link the phones into our Smoothwall device for which they grabbed a number of reserved IP addresses from me.

 

Anyone ideas on what I can check for the school when I am in next?

 

Thanks

[Wave9_Lee]

You could try and work out if it happens at a particular time or day. And if so, try to isolate any network events that happen at the same time, perhaps on specific segments. I.e. periods of heavy usage (updates, backups, logons etc) If there is no QOS on the LAN or the broadband connection it will be difficult to guarantee call quality. Having QOS applied on the Smoothwall won't help a lot if the ISP won't/can't honour the packets.