Hi.
A friend of mine has two locations, each served by T1's.
He has an ESI phone system with the CPU located at his main location. The incoming calls come in via a dynamic T1, where bandwidth is allocated to either outside voice calls or Internet, depending on whether anyone is talking on an outside line at the time. This location has an Astaro ASG 120 with Firmware 7.511.
His second (branch) location has IP phones that connect to main location's ESI CPU via the Internet. This branch location has an ASG 110 with 7.511.
He gets awful jitter from time to time while using a remote phone at the branch location. This occurs especially when someone at the main location is using the Internet heavily.
Now, I have a client with a similar ESI phone system, a main and branch location, that are served with routers using DD-WRT firmware. In that instance I was able to all but eliminate jitter by configuring the QoS settings on the DD-WRT routers.
Now, the DD-WRT QoS settings are quite a bit different than the QoS settings I found on the Astaro routers. On DD-WRT, you set your upstream speed to something a little less than what the connection provides, and then you can prioritize different types of traffic. So I was able to tell DD-WRT the traffic coming from the IP phones was "Premium," and everything else defaults to "Standard." So if something is going out from the phones, it trumps everything else.
The DD-WRT QoS works quite well. The client where I use it had terrible problems w/ jitter before the DD-WRT routers with QoS, and those problems cleared-up after the DD-WRT routers with QoS.
The Astaro QoS settings basically seem to allow me to "slice" some of the bandwidth off for the phones. We did this with my friend's Astaro units, basically allocating 256-KB of bandwidth to the phone system (enough for at least four voice calls via the Internet), but he still gets terrible jitter at the branch office when the main office is pushing their Internet connection.
I don't have much experience with the Astaro units, and I'm not sure I've approached this issue correctly. I may not have a "switch" thrown somewhere. Perhaps there are other QoS features I don't know about.
ASSUME nothing. My exposure to Astaro routers is so limited please let me know even what you might think is the most obvious thing that needs checking.
If anyone has words of wisdom on how to proceed, I'm all ears.
FWIW, BTW, the ESI phone systems do not use any standard VOIP protocols. Apparently you have to be able to configure your QoS parameters by IP or MAC address.
TIA for any input.
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