Finicky QOS

Laura's Blog
The link to Laura Chappel's blog is really a teaser she posted to make us interested in her "top 10 reasons why the network is slow" online training session.
If "training" was not a bad word around here, I'd recommend a couple of us attend that session and all the rest of them too. They are just $99 and they are awesome. I was able to watch one of them some time ago and it was extraordinary.
Anyway, her blog has a link to a sample capture file. I wish I had gathered some captures a while back on our network because we had this very issue at one of our WAN sites.
That office moved and got a new phone setup: all IP phones pointed to an enterprise phone system back in the HQ datacenter. That was all fine and good except the voice contractor doesn't listen to anything we say and we spent several days coming to some kind of half understanding of what the setup was and how we needed to make adjustments to QOS.
Basically, we just need to dedicate half our circuit to the EF queue and then stick everything in it. :) Having work now with both Avaya and Cisco VOIP people I find there is a really big gap in Avaya contractors giving a care about communicating with network people.

Cisco::Video Conferencing::QOS::VOIP

Quality of Service Design Overview

From the book: End-to-End QoS Network Design

VOIP::Cisco::Echo

Troubleshooting Echo in VOIP calls

http://tools.cisco.com/cmn/jsp/index.jsp?id=14832&redir=YES

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk652/tk698/technologies_tech_note09186a0080149a1f.shtml

Cisco::VOIP::Delay establishing call

PROBLEM:
Sometimes it take 5-10 seconds for both parties of a call to hear each other.
This is because the RTP channel comes up after the source router receives a connect message from the destination router. The connect message is sent after the person being called picks up the phone.
FIX:
At the router, input the following:

ROUTER(config)#voice rtp send-recv

This will make all calls establish the voice path in both directions before a connect messagee is received from the dest switch.