We have a Trixbox appliance at our office and we have a remote user who we have been having inbound voice issues with. Internally our voice and data networks are separate. The Trixbox appliance is outside of our firewall. It has PRI connection to a Cisco IAD which is in turn connected to 2 bonded T1's. The Cisco IAD also has an ethernet connection to our data network so both regular data and voip go through this box. We use Cisco 7960 hardphones. We have no issue with voice quality on calls made and received by phones physically at the same location as our Trixbox. We have a remote employee who has a cable modem for access into our network. He has a Cisco hardphone that connects to the external IP interface of our Trixbox. When he calls into our office his voice quality often becomes very choppy. He never has trouble hearing us and when he calls other external phones he has not had any reports of bad voice quality. We have tried a couple of different ISPs for him, different methods of connecting to his modem and enabling QoS features on his router using Tomato firmware. We have tried a traffic shaper on our network to limit our overall data bandwidth and nothing has made a difference. Our business T1 supplier has told us that QoS is not being applied to incoming data and according to them we would need MPLS service to have this done (not cost effective). It is important to our business that our remote employee is on the same phone network (he is on ring groups, etc.). We are running Asterisk 1.2.24 and Trixbox 2.2.10. Does anybody have any suggestions for further debug of this problem or a suggested configuration that might make this work? It seems to me that this should be a workable configuration, but we have multiple service providers all pointing their fingers at each other. Thanks.
Help With Remote User
Thanks. I understand about the PRI/T1 "It has PRI connection to a Cisco IAD which is in turn connected to 2 bonded T1's."
We have attempted to use a traffic shaping device to limit the data bandwidth, but this only helped somewhat. That being said it does appear to be related to the data traffic. If we intentionally spike the data traffic while our remote user is on the phone the incoming audio degrades. The thing I can't quite understand is why other phones in the office don't experience the same problem if everything is carried over the same T1 lines? It seems like internal phone traffic is being prioritized in some way.
Do you have any suggestions for a remote employee configuration such as this? It seems that even if I doubled the data bandwidth I still would see the same problem if all of the T1 bandwidth is allowed to be consumed by data.
Thanks again.
The IAD has bidirectional QoS for the voice channels. Your traffic shaper only works for outbound traffic, you can't provide back pressure to the inbound Internet traffic.
Does your provider offer tiered service with QoS? Most providers have an MPLS service that you can have a silver, gold and platinum port. Each one with higher QoS.
Ok, that makes sense. Let's say that our provider has been less than helpful in this case. One of their tech support people suggested MPLS, but the sales person kind of dismissed it. The only option they seemed to offer was $600/month and he didn't go into any details. We only have one remote employee working from home so if this is truly the only option then it doesn't make sense.
I'm grasping for any other configurations that might make sense and still allow this employee to be on the Trixbox.
Tim
I'm grasping for any other configurations
Grasping is the key word. You only have control over what you send not what is sent to you.
I can assume you are running a local email server. There is nothing you can do to stop the speed of inbound traffic, the sending server will use every bit of bandwidth you have.

Member Since:
2010-03-05