Phone quality between offices

General Help
1

Office A
phone server
Windows server
pfsense firewall

Office B
pfsense firewall
everything else logs into office A using domain credentials

Scenario: Office B is connected to office A across the pfsense vpn. Phones in office B use internal address of phone server, in Office A, to connect the phones.

Issue: Phones in office B have bad quality.

How do i get better quality for phones in Office B since it doesn’t have its own phone server. I can only assume everything is going across the link between offices because it was setup before I started working here. I tried vpn, but doesn’t work because the offices are connected? Ideas?

2

hi, I think you need to start at Layer 1 and move up. I am assuming your two sites have internet connections and a site to site vpn between them. I would start by verifying that (at both ends) your internet connections are error free. Try some pings site to site. what is your average/high ping time? are you dropping any?
Don’t bother with phone vpn, you already have a vpn in place, you don’t need another.

fwiw

3

pings are running from 17 to 28ms from phone server to phones in other office

4

one phone even had a 45ms ping

5

average is between 20 and 23

6

VoIP is affected by latency and packet loss.
Check whether your link is not saturated when you experience bad call quality. What codec are you using?

7

We have different ones we can use with our grandstream phones. Its just finding the right one that works well.

8

The one that consumes less bandwidth is g729, but then again, you need to check your link for latency and packet loss.

9

the highest was 45ms between phone server and phone, no packet loss with ping test

10

You would need to test for latency and packet loss while you are talking between offices, ideally when you experience quality issues.

11

Agree with Tony, start with your ISP quality, then really scrutinize your vpn quality, then consider phones and codecs.

We have plenty of s2s vpns with phones going across them to our fpbx at HQ, albeit running on real equipment not pfsense, with no issues. Maybe I’m biased but I’ve always run enterprise grade hardware and not had problems, but read threads for years about people complaining about problems and quality issues running pfsense.

The only times we have complaints is when the local Comcast node at some of our rural sites starts experiencing heavy packet loss. We know about it real quick when that happens.

12

I have a site-to-site VPN between pfSense and Mikrotik that connects my home extension with my office FreePBX and the call qaulity is excellent, except when my office internet connection is saturated, at which time I start experiencing choppy audio due to high latency and packet loss if the saturation is on both the download and upload. So try checking the state of the internet connection at the exact moment that you experience quality issues.

13

We realized if we utilized the Gig ports more, on our switch, we could speed up things. We are a very small company and just need more patch cables to utilize the Gig ports and even possible load balancing across NICs. Some of our ports are only 100 where others are Gig.

14

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