UPDATE: Since my original post may be too long, here’s the short of it:
Can anyone recommend a procedure or checklist for setting up small office VoIP using the MikroTik RB2011 and Router.OS?
Can you point me to any articles or other posts that provide solid, general guidance on troubleshooting outgoing voice quality problems?
thanks!
Phil
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Disclaimer: I am and engineer but no expert at IT/VoIP set up and this is my first post to the forum. I apologize if I’ve not provided adequate information – please let me know if I can do better!
Problem Description: For the past several months, we’ve had voice quality issues on our company VoIP phones. There are three phones, but usually only one or two in use at a time (not a big bandwidth hog up or down). Other internet traffic is from several PCs on the LAN, but never anything heavy duty (no streaming up or down, no heavy uploads).
Most of the time, the audio quality is good (both directions), but intermittently suffers on the outgoing direction. Sometimes, the outside person can’t hear our inside person, or the audio is garbled to the outside person. Occasionally the calls drop / disconnect entirely.
We have a Charter Business ISP package: 100 Mbps Down / 10 Mbps Up and I’ve never done a Speed Test which didn’t come close to or exceed these expected speeds. Static IP.
Equipment (in order from ISP coax coming in):
- CISCO “DPC3216 MTA” Cable Modem
- MikroTik RB2011-iL-IN GigaBit Router
RouterOS v6.44.3 web interface - One Google WiFI Puck configured in Bridge Mode to avoid Double NAT
- LAN equipment plugged into the Router via CAT6 cables:
Two HP PCs
Two ObiHai Obi1062 VoIP phones - On Google WiFi Access Point:
Two or three laptops PCs
Third ObiHai Obi1062 VoIP Phone
Two WiFi Printers
TCL LCD Smart TV in conference room
CAT 6 cables between Router and all listed LAN equipment
I’ve been reading a lot about SIP-ALG, Packet Latency/Collisions, QoS Prioritization, etc., but have not the confidence to try changes inside the Router. I did try disabling ‘sip’ but the outgoing audio quality problems persisted so I re-enabled it.
Charter Tech Support convinced me that their Modem showed no logged events of problems (outages, packets dropped) over the past 22 days or so…
We are using Google Voice Professional (a paid subscription) and Google Voice Tech Support has not been very helpful (they are asking us to do things we can’t do such as share the phone numbers of the people we are calling when the problem occurs, or to Duplicate the Problem (it’s a bit “random”).
Questions:
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What should I look at inside the Router to confirm the outgoing audio is suffering from dropped packets or other transfer problems associated with poor audio quality or dropped calls?
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Do I need to do anything first to assist with VoIP traffic troubleshooting (such as tagging VoIP data packets)? If so, what are the steps and what am I looking for?
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Is there a standard QoS Optimization for VoIP that I can do within the Router that is fairly straight forward and proven? If so, what are the steps?
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If this is not being caused by the Router or Phone configuration, what should I be asking the ISP to do/confirm/verify?
Any help or advice anyone can offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time in advance!
Phil