Our offices have about 25 employees connected to a wired network, but the building is pretty old so we only have one network jack per office. We have Cisco 7960 phones and have tried to use the phone’s built-in network switch to coonect the phones the asterisk server.
On one DELL switch, we are running an asterisk server, an application server, a web server, a print server, and a filer server. The network is fine until we start plugging in the phones and then the network goes kaput.
I konw it is ideal to run the phones on a completely seperate network and switch, but is there any way to get this to work? Is wireless an option?
Please help, we have about 10k into this project already and are stuck.
Any advice is appreciated. If there are any knowledgable consultants in the Las Vegas area out there that are willing to help us out for a fee, please contact me.
If the switch supports it, you may want to consider setting up VLANs to segment your VoIP traffic from your application traffic. I believe the 7960s support VLAN tagging.
I have a few stores setup with 10+ computers on a crappy 3com switch. grandstream phones and dell pc’s . Everything works just fine. We are not using Voip on the outside TDM cards to dial out. Of course most of hte traffic in the stores is just e-mail and Telnet to a remote unix box.
You should implement LAN-based QoS or as someone mentioned above, VLANs. Cisco switches support VLAN. I have used both VLAN and diff serv on HP switches.
I doubt you are reaching any bandwidth limit on your switch - just sounds like configuration problems.
I would make sure that you have everything set to “AUTO” on your switches and devices or manually set everything to 100M FD, having one side set to auto and the other to 100M FD can cause major CRC problems and phones bring out the best of network issues
make sure the CISCO phones are doing their own vlan tagging - cause they can and then your computers could possible be knocked off the network.
