How do you setup your voice and data networks?

[h2009]

Hi there,
One of my own networks has hit its bottleneck for voice and data now, so I have the chance to recreate it from the ground up.

The only requirements is that on this setup I can only use 1 WAN connection for both voice and data - 10mb line.

I was wondering if you anyone would like to share the way in which they would create a voice and data network, i.e. would you use VLAN's and different subnets, simple network with QoS and tagging, etc.

Thanks

 

[leejor]

QoS is probably the way to go. If you use a VoIP provider that supports QoS tags then voice quality would be better right though to them. If you use another method on a single network then non-VoIP traffic , if the network gets too busy,can cause noise on the voice calls. You have to have a way to tag the packets right from the user if the local network (PC to PC traffic) is the problem. Many ISP's that provide VoIP will only support QoS if their combo router/VoIP adapter is used as the router provides the QoS service, that still won't help on internal traffic. You will have to speak to your provider to see if they support it.

 

[h2009]

Well i was actually looking for how you would model a network to support voice and data - i.e. given the resources would you use a VLAN to separate them and still use QoS at the router side.

 

[leejor]

Some router allow you to give certain MAC addresses priority in the network. For QoS to work properly it has to be supported by all points along the way. Your router tags outgoing voice packets and your ISP uses that to route to your VoIp provider. That will "usually" only work in the case of the ISP also being the VoIP provider otherwise the ISP could just ignore the priority tags.

Some people get paid a lot of money, and take a great deal of time, to go into a company and design and set up their networks tailored to their usage. You are probably not really going to get the sort of information here that is going to allow you to best put together your network especially if there are bandwidth issues of any sort.