SD-WAN voice quality problems

[jimbojimbo]

Have a customer with a SD-WAN over internet. Of course having voice quality issues.

Anyone else have experience with SD-WAN implementations? Can you share your experience.

 

[kyle555]

I'm rather unfamiliar with software defined networking in general.

Seen some cool stuff Avaya and others were showing off before the sell-off to Extreme.

At the end of the day, QoS is QoS. 802.1p/q or DSCP or whatever your Wan is using. Got a link to any particular carrier's offering? I'd be curious to give it a read. For your problem, how do they prioritize voice?

 

[joe2938]

no qos over the internet, better off with a good mpls or vpn circuit

 

[tomt_SF]

That seems to be a common problem with SD-WANs that run over the Internet because it is a shared resource. Even with advanced path selection and forward error correction, it is often not the answer for long-distance VoIP communications.
 
The only way to guarantee the voice quality and reduce the number of dropped calls is to use a global private network that supports both on-premises and cloud voice applications. Check out Aryaka’s Global SD-WAN that is used by hundreds of large enterprises to address that very problem. We recently announced a partnership with 8x8 Communications to solve these issues and improve performance for their UCaaS customers. Feel free to drop me a note to see how we can help you.

http://www.aryaka.com

 

[mmcalli]

Which SD WAN solution are they using and what method is being used for traffic balancing? We recently deployed Citrix appliances to all our outlying health clinics and added DIA circuits to each in addition to our existing Cox MPLS Metro Ethernet circuits. We are still experiencing some errors with FSY (file sync errors)to the gateway LSP's and other intermittent weird things that we didn't have before but we're slowly getting it dialed in--it's an experience!

 

[Steve Garson]

QoS only helps so much. Won't fix middle-mile issues. Can you give us more detail about your architecture design, approx locations, and/or path latency, loss, jitter stats?

Someone mentioned Aryaka here as an alternative. Might be expensive but in principle swapping out the middle mile can be the right move. There are other approaches. Anyway, send us more detail and can help more.

Steve

 

[LoPath]

We run VoIP all over the US using broadband connections and VPN devices. It's a crapshoot, dependent upon the provider's network. Our AT&T MPLS connections are pretty good. Sites with "residential quality" internet and VPN devices are usually okay, but we occasionally get a site that's pretty bad. It usually requires changing providers to get a stable connection. You definitely need QoS on the head-end, though, to prioritize the voice over data if you're running a lot of traffic.

LoPath
Maintain HiPath 4000 V5 & V6, OpenScape Xpert V4, Xpressions, Contact Center

 

[joe2938]

@STEVE, NO QOS over the internet

 

[jimbojimbo]

Part of the issue was with the Aryaka QoS configuration. Unfortunately we don't push customers to install SLAMON. Great tool for basic network troubleshooting we use with our hosted systems.

We do however use Appneta devices and some additional software tools and were able to identify QoS issues on the customer LAN/WAN.

Still having specific voice quality issues on conference calls using a third party conferencing provider so now we have phone<->LAN/WAN<->SBC<->Carrier<->Third Party<->Carrier<->SBC<->LAN/WAN<->phone.

Working with Conference Phone vendor, carrier, and third party conferencing provider to try and figure out where things are skewed.

Life was much easier when the demarcation was at the DS1 circuit/loopback.

 

[kyle555]

Do none of them have any monitoring? You'd think it's pretty trivial to log the SBC with RTCP and compare notes for a call. MOS 4.0 from you to your carrier, MOS 3.2 from your carrier to the 3rd, that's where they'd want to look...