Hi,
What I have is two office phone systems (2 locations) and 5 IP phones. The two office systems communicate with each other over IP and so do the 5 IP phones. We have a T1 at each office. The 5 IP phones are at branch offices that have DSL.
We are not current using Cisco routers and have in place some SonicWall routers. We are experiencing voice quality issues and are thinking about switching to Cisco routers because of this.
I have enabled QoS on the SonicWall routers as well as outgoing bandwdith management to limit the amount of bandwidth consumed by non-voice traffic. This made a huge improvement in voice quality although we are still not where we want to be.
I have an IP phone and I can always hear people just fine. This would mean that outgoing traffic from our main office to me works great and that the outgoing bandwidth limiting of non-voice traffic is doing its job. The problem is that people are unable to hear my voice going back to that location. I have a theory on this which is that people at that location are consuming the incoming bandwidth and there isn't enough leftover for the incoming voice traffic.
The question is - how do you limit incoming bandwidth? The SonicWall does have a feature to do this, but it makes the problem worse rather than better. I don't really see how you can throttle what is sent to you because once you have it, it has already been received.
I guess there must be some sort of technique for throttling outgoing requests that can throttle the incoming packets for that type of traffic. Does Cisco utilize some sort of techniques like this?
Questions:
- Do you think replacing our routers with Cisco routers would solve this problem? In other worse, does Cisco have some sort of technique for properly sharing voice and data on the same WAN connection in such a way that the data traffic will not cause problems for the voice traffic?
- I thought about putting the voice on its on dedicated WAN connection, but this will complicate the network configuration as well as have a service cost to it.
- I found something called a "traffic shaping bridge". Would this be a possible solution worth looking at?
Thanks,
Alan