VoiP phones, Excessive packet loss and errors

[tturay]

Hi All,

Just wondering if someone has seen this before.  We are running a Mitel 3300 MXe with HP procurve switches.

Although no one has reported any problems with our VoiP phones, when I take a look at the stats on the network switches, I see many of the IP phones have hundreds to millions of packet errors and drops.  I even cleared the counters and the next day it goes back to the exact same number.  Always, the same number!!  None of these users report any issues.  Some of the phones have a PC plugged into them and some don’t.  I have changed the cable, switch port, set to from auto to 100 full, different phone etc.  Nothing seems to make a difference.

Any ideas?

[ralph]

I have seen this on two occasions:
1) When a dataswitch was hard coded and the phone was not.
2) On a port connecting a MXe II (ver 4.2) connected to a cisco switch.  In this case this issue cleared up when we upgraded to ver 6.0

Ralph

[Rmitel]

Hi

Is the 3300 behind a firewall of any type?  Or are you using an external sip provider for the lines or traditional isdn?

[tturay]

Thanks for the replies.

The 3300 is behind a firewall from the outside world but fully open to the internal network.

It is an external SIP provider.

Is this one of those things that I should just ignore since it is not causing any main issues or this the calm before the storm?

[Rmitel]

Thanks for the replies.

The 3300 is behind a firewall from the outside world but fully open to the internal network.

It is an external SIP provider.

Is this one of those things that I should just ignore since it is not causing any main issues or this the calm before the storm?

Hi!

This is exactly the same as our setup and we have the same "problem".  It isn't a problem at all....

When using a sip provider, the mitel and phone use the sip protocol to negotiate the call, as soon as the call is established the audio traffic goes directly between the handset and the sip provider, the mitel then interprets this as dropped packets.  They are not really being dropped, just simply being redirected :-)

If using isdn, all traffic obviously has to go via the pbx so this is why it doesn't happen in that situation.

Hope this helps?

R

[tturay]

Thanks for the info Rmitel.

No more sleepless nights! 

Cheers!