1:00 AM
Paul B
A while back my company went through a phone system change. We had a Panasonic PBX system when I first started that was a bear to use. Mainly because it was complicated, and because it wasn't a well known PBX system so finding consultants that knew it was difficult. We ended up trading up for a hosted VoIP service from 8x8. In order to make the change we had to buy a new firewall and new switches. The switches we had couldn't handle VLANs, and the Firewall we had needed to be able to handle multiple WAN links and support either WAN load balancing or failover. It could handle it, but the cost of a license from Cisco was going to be over $600, while buying a new Netgear Prosafe SRX5308 was only going to be a little over $400. Like everything at my company, we went down the cheap road.
Anyway, it took a while to figure out how to properly configure the Netgear for VoIP Quality of Service (QoS). The documentation just tells you where to setup QoS, but not how to configure it for VoIP. I finally figured it out, so I'll tell you how I did it here. There are a few places you need to make some configurations.
- Security > Services > QoS Profiles Tab
- Click Add, and create a new profile called Phones
- Use these settings:
Remark: Checked
QoS: IP Precedence
QoS Value: 7
QoS Priority: High
- Security > Firewall
- Under Outbound rules click Add
- Use the following settings:
Service: Any
Action: Allow Always
LAN Users: Address Range
Start and End of your phone's IP range
WAN Users: Any
QoS Profile: Phones
Finally we need to enable QoS by doing the following:
- Network Configuration > QoS
- Set Enable QoS to Yes, and set the QoS type to Priority
- Add a new rule with the following settings:
QoS Type: Priority
Interface: The interface you want your VoIP traffic to traverse
Service: Any
Direction: Outbound Traffic
Priority: High
After that, you should have decent calls. You can test your VoIP settings by using 8x8's tool here. If everything is green, you should have everything configured correctly. If after these settings changes, and everything tests green you still have dropped calls or something, you might want to up your Internet bandwidth.
[Edit 7/25/2012] - One more thing that we found after a bandwidth upgrade, was that we had to create a bandwidth profile. Our phone Internet connection is a 5Mbps connection, so I wanted the phones to have at the very minimum 3Mbps, and a Max of 5Mbps. To set that up you first have to tell the firewall what your WAN bandwidth is by going to Network Configuration > WAN Advanced Options > Upload/Download Settings for Bandwidth Profiling. After that is set do the following:
- Got to Security > Bandwidth Profile
- Click the Add button
- Add a new profile with the following settings
Profile Name: Phones
Direction: Outbound Traffic
Outbound Minimum: 3072
Outbound Maximum: 5120
Type: Group - Click Apply
- Change the Enabled Bandwidth Profiles radio button to Yes
- Go back to your outbound firewall rule we created above and add the Phones bandwidth profile to the rule.
