I've taken a director's position in a school district that installed an ESI phone system just over a year ago. My predecessor had to coordinate an effort with HP on our procurve equipment configurations and that of the phone system. I think the attempt was made to setup a dedicated VLAN (vlan 3) for voice. The ESI programming reflects that, but we have phones getting ip addresses from our DHCP server intendent for the data network. We're running our computers data connection through our phones. We have phones that will stutter or echo during a call. Some callers can't hear the person on the other end or visa-versa. The original installer is telling me I should just run the phones on the same network with my data, but the UDP traffic brings our wireless nework to a halt.

I'd appreciate any thoughts or suggestions on this problem.

Thanks

Are these remote phones or local ?

Is the system a Comm Server or an IP 900?

Rcaman

@Steve

Funny you ask. According to documentation the phones residing outside of the subnet the phone system is on are supposed to be configured "remote". But common practice is to try local, if it doesn't work we set it for remote.

@RCaman

The system is an IP 1000. Three cabinets, 14 IP cards.

Two things to check. I ran into this same problem and the culprit was a Cisco POE switch. The actual power being supplied to the IP phones from the Cisco switch was not sufficient to run the phones. Two solutions are available. 1. Change out the POE switch with another switch or 2. Use POE Power Injectors.

The other thing may be the switch speed. If your network switch that those phones are on that are exhibiting the problems is a 10/100 switch, you need to change it out to a Gigabit switch.

Rcaman

@RCaman

Last night I completely reconfigured the network. My predecessor and the tech team from ESI set up the switches with the VLAN 3 (Voice VLAN), but did not include any ip addresses in which to route to. I subnetted a 10.3.0.0/20 and then assigned the first address of each subnet to my edge switches. I then added the static routes and now things seem to be much better. Now only a few phones are having trouble connecting. The intercom systems at each of our schools have an ESI 50 set up as an digital to analog converter running over esi-link. I changed the ip of each ESI 50 to an ip for the subnet designated and that worked as well!!

The only problem I have now is with faxes. Many of our faxes are actually routed through the ESI 1000 system we have. I'm told the Linksys voice gateways we are using will not work over a routed network. However, I noticed that I can ping the ip address of a voice gateway from the switch that the ESI 1000 is uplinked to. I think it has something to do with "sip registration". The system says I have 52 SIP STATION licenses, but I'm not sure how many are in use/available.