QoS on Soft Phone

[bp1]

We have an environment where we will roll out the instance as cloud-hosted w/ an SBC at the main site. There are a handful of remote workers that will connect directly to the cloud with their SIP and/or soft phones. We've been asked if they could use 50% soft phones at the main site rather than using desk phones. It's not a huge site (~100 users) but one where we fully intended in using a voice VLAN to QoS from the native VLAN traffic.

Does anyone have experience with this type of setup? Most of the PCs are single-NIC, Windows machines so, without some form of virtual-NIC or interface binding, it would appear we'll need to re-engineer the network to implement QoS (likely VLANs based on # of machines or business unit - which was originally deemed excessively complicated for a sub-100 user office).

Thanks in advance for your experience/advice!

 

[cobaltit]

It sounds like you are overcomplicating things. 3CX is just an application. If you want to do QoS then do QoS. Since you can't necessarily to it by physical port or VLAN because of the app usage, you would just do it by traffic type or destination (depending on what equipment you have installed and the capabilities. This is exactly the same as if you wanted to prioritize SalesForce usage or some other traffic that originates from the PCs.

 

[bp1]

Yep, figured that would probably be the case. We usually implement port-based VLAN tagging on SIP phones or at the switch-level to isolate the broadcast network. We'll just push further up the stack for this deployment and QoS dst & TCP/UDP. Thanks for the quick reply.

 

[cobaltit]

Bingo. And I guess technically overthinking more than overcomplicating. Sometimes people get lost in the details because it's 'VoIP' or '3CX' when it's just packets like anything else and should be treated as such.