As we celebrate Shark Week this week, we are reminded of the proverbial sharks faced by network engineers in the form of security breaches and technical issues. TeleDynamics has created a collection of resources to help you troubleshoot audio problems, secure your network, protect your telephone system from hackers, analyze voice packets, and more. In this article, we offer a compilation of some of our most popular resources, so you’ll have them handy. For each listing below, click on the blue heading to read the full article.

While it doesn’t happen often, every once in a while you’ll come across an IP phone that simply won’t cooperate. You may have gone through every troubleshooting procedure that you can think of, but the phone continues to refuse to function correctly. You begin to consider the possibility of a defective phone, but before you invoke the manufacturer’s warranty, you want to be sure. Here we review the steps you can take to confirm, to a reasonably high degree, that the problem is indeed a defective device.

If you are a voice network engineer, then it has probably happened to you. Your SIP server is all set up and you have plugged in your IP phone. Its lights come on, its screen is activated, you see the loading icon rotating, and then… nothing. For some reason, the phone will not register.

IP phone registration issues are, unfortunately, not uncommon. In this article, we examine the most common causes of registration failures, and best practices for troubleshooting and resolving them.

Jitter is one of the most common causes of substandard voice communications over IP networks. This article provides an overview of jitter and how it influences voice applications, as well as methods for resolving it on your networks.

Wouldn’t it be great to have superhero X-ray vision that allows you to understand, in a single glance, what is going on with the voice traffic on your network? In fact, it is possible to do so using the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). In this article, we take a look at this protocol and highlight the special features it has up its sleeve to help you with your VoIP monitoring needs.

One of the best methods for troubleshooting problems on the network to pinpoint the cause of poor voice quality or a disruption of VoIP services is to capture voice packets in real time and store them so we can analyze them later. When people call TeleDynamics tech support, we sometimes ask them to show us their packet capture files so we can help identify the issue. In this article, we examine practical methods for capturing voice packets at various locations within the network.

One of the most challenging problems that you may face as a voice engineer is dealing with poor voice quality on VoIP systems. It’s often much easier to deal with problems where something stops working completely, rather than trying to resolve an intermittent fault such as bad voice quality.

Many things can cause poor voice quality, and the methodology to investigate those causes is not always readily clear. In this article, we’ll share some tips on where to start and what to do, so that you can quickly identify and diagnose the problem.

A firewall is a vital component of any enterprise network. But, it can also wreak havoc on the operation of VoIP implementations. In this article, we address the most common problems a firewall can introduce to an IP telephony network, as well as best practices for avoiding or remedying them.

How to deal with jitter, packet loss, latency and signaling delay

Some of the most difficult issues to troubleshoot on a network are failures resulting in a degradation of service, a slowdown in speed, or intermittent connectivity, as opposed to a complete disruption in service.

When it comes to troubleshooting issues involving VoIP, this becomes even more acute. Intermittent, low-quality, and metallic-sounding voice, as well as erratic connectivity between VoIP end devices, are all network problems falling into this difficult-to-diagnose category.

Almost all such malfunctions are due to a faulty implementation (or lack thereof) of quality of service mechanisms. In this article, we will look at some of the most common failures of this type, what they sound like, and what should be done to verify and rectify the problems.

If you’re on the voice side of the telecommunications industry, it is inevitable that you will be dealing with data networking. As Voice over IP (VoIP) technologies are overtaking more traditional telephony systems such as ISDN and analog, the voice engineer is required to know data networking fundamentals in order to implement, maintain and troubleshoot modern voice systems.

Back in 1999, when VoIP was still in its infancy, Industry Expert Bruce Robertson told students in the Sheridan College Telecommunications Management post graduate program, “If you go into the telecom industry on the data side, you will probably stay on the data side for all of your career. If you go in on the voice side of things, you will inevitably become involved with the data side, as well.”

This statement has certainly borne true. So, if you’re an expert in ISDN, SS7 or other conventional telephony technologies, it’s essential to also be familiar with data networking fundamentals to remain competitive and relevant in the telecom industry. In this article we look at a nifty tool called a packet sniffer that can be used for troubleshooting many types of VoIP problems and should be in the toolbox of any telephone installer.