Dead air and the network

[telecomPA]

hi, we have IP phones all over the place that register to our main hub here in the US. we get complaints from time to time about dead air, one-way audio and ghost calls (no one on the other line).

have any of you ever checked round-trip time on the network when this occurs? basically, we tend to always look at the PBX first when i think we could benefit from running simple ping and tracert commands, etc.

i just don't know what the correct approach would be. would appreciate any feedback to look at the network side and perform simple troubleshooting.

 

[AvayaTier3]

Intermittent troubles like you describe are usually network issues but can be the switch.

Command: list trace station xxxx

list trace is a very good switch command line tool to use if you can duplicate failures because it shows the trunks, IP endpoints, medpro, network regions, etc. that are related to the call.

Example:
If you have two medpros and every other call has an issue, it would help you determine which medpro to reset, reseat, or replace.



A great teacher, does not provide answers, but methods to teach others "How and where to find the answers"

bsh

37 years Bell, AT&T, Lucent, Avaya
Tier 3 for 27 years and counting

http://bshtele.com

 

[telecomPA]

agreed, but i know how to run list traces. list traces don't always show you much other than jitter and packet loss.

what other steps can i take from a network perspective to try to pinpoint the problem our agents will experience?

sometimes you get 5 or 6 agents complain about an issue while there are 50 agents total. and the other 40 plus are ok. so there has to be a tool that i can use, other than wireshark, to try to find the problem.

 

[dialtonebone]

Can you constantly reproduce the issue?

 

[telecomPA]

most of the times we can't reproduce the issue and it's intermittent. it's almost always random and 1 out of 5 calls or 1 out of 10 calls.

other times it's more prevalent, say 1 out of every 3 calls, and at that point, it tends to be more obvious as to what is causing the issue.

but when it's random, it's needle in a haystack. you can look at errors, alarms, events and list traces all day long and it's not going to tell you what's wrong.

i was hoping someone would have some troubleshooting steps on the network side even though we're all Voice geeks here.