A VoIP Troubleshooting Short post
I found a helpful short article on Kapanga's blog that I thought was worth sharing for some very quick and dirty tips
Troubleshooting VoIP: What is Dead Air?It was nice to see it pointed out that in VoIP the voice, or media, and signaling generally may use different routes or protocols. And Ethereal is a fabulous troubleshooting too.One of the most common problems when placing/receiving VoIP calls is when a call is established but there is neither audio nor video. This condition is commonly known as “dead air”.
For those used to the old standard TDM telephony this is an uncommon situation, audio for calls is guaranteed as soon as the call is established; this is because media (audio/video) and signaling (information required to establish and terminate a call) travel typically through the same route so if there is no media, there will be no call either.
For VoIP, the route of the media is almost always completely independent from the route of the signaling. If for some reason the path for the media is broken, the call will exhibit a “dead air” condition.
Technorati Tags: VoIP, troubleshooting VoIP, Ethereal
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Comments
Many of our engineers would have many comments on this point... it is one of the nightmares during a testing session in a complex network (but, unfortunately, not only). Usually you hear "It rings, I take the call, but no audio...". Sometimes this problem is monodirectional, other times bidirectional. Anyway, thanks for taking us back to the "engineering world", when I dealt with those kind of problems every day... :-)
Posted by: luca | September 7, 2006 12:43 PM
Thanks Luca. You've actually reminded me of another very common problems I've seen with softphones running on WinXP. The audio controls may often reset the volume level to zero. When you open them up, the WAV slider in particular seems to have a tendency to reset to the bottom. I've found many cases where audio was working just fine, but the volume was so low it sounded like silence.
Posted by: Ken Camp | September 7, 2006 12:58 PM
If i may ask, what blog software are you running? how much does it cost? and where can i get a copy? if you dont mind me asking.
Posted by: Voipman | February 13, 2008 9:52 AM