Traffic shaping for VOIP

Hello, everyone.
Just wanted to consult with this list if there is a way to manage VOIP traffic effeciently.
Our sip provider has recommended us NOT to use traffic shaping for VOIP traffic (I’m using tc from iproute2 suite for traffic shaping). They are saying that traffic shaping for VOIP is evil because in any case (even if I give the highest priority to VOIP packets) shaper will queue ALL packets first, therefore increasing latency of VOIP. Their recommendation was to reserve some bandwidth for VOIP and shape just the rest of the traffic.
Thanks in advance for your replies.

This is a good point, you might conduct some tests to see how much latency if any it adds (sip qualify=yes might do it).
However QoS / traffic shaping is IMHO still very important, simply because it is better to have slightly higher latency than to have chop due to insufficient bandwidth.

I suppose it really depends on your situation. If your shaper is not adding a noticable amount of latency, then dont worry about it.