There's no doubt that whenever you're looking to overhaul a major part of your business's infrastructure, such as
your networking or telecommunications, unexpected challenges are going to arise. No matter how easy-to-use a system is, technical issues of some sort are bound to rear their head from time to time.
This is even true of a Cisco phone system. Modern networking is too complex for everything to run smoothly 100% of the time. So, we wanted to put together a quick guide for people having problems with their Cisco VoIP phones, to help you quickly solve some of the more common issues you might have.
Solutions To Common Problems With A Cisco Phone System
I. When in doubt, reboot.
Just like with most computerized tools these days, a reboot is still one of the most reliable solutions to a wide variety of problems. Before getting too heavily into troubleshooting, reboot the phone and restart your Cisco Communicator application. This will solve most random issues without any further work needing to be done.
Note: It is possible to restart phones remotely via the Communicator, but this will cause any current calls to be dropped, so use this feature with caution.
II. Upgrade your firmware.
If you're having trouble with your Cisco phones, it's important to ensure you're using the most recent firmware with the latest bug fixes. Check on Cisco's site and verify your phones' firmware and your communications software are fully upgraded to the current standards.
III. Echo, delay, and other voice quality issues.
Echo and delay in your VoIP calls generally are caused by one of two problems. The first is if you have unshielded cat-5 cables picking up interference, which is only best solved by buying better cables. Otherwise, there's a good chance that the filtering parameters in your router are incorrect, and it's not differentiating between voice and data traffic. Enabling this in software should fix the problem.
Other voice quality issues are generally due to insufficient bandwidth available. In some
smaller, rural areas this may be unavoidable simply because of the local infrastructure. Upgrading your connection such as adding more T1 lines to support more bandwidth may also help, as VoIP phones do place a significant added burden on your existing network.
IV. Lengthy calls are dropped.
This is one that can be puzzling, but actually has a simple solution. If lengthy calls are being
dropped unexpectedly, with no other evident problems, the likely culprit is your Maximum Call Duration setting within the Unified Communications Manager. As the name implies, this causes the system to automatically drop any call that exceeds the set length of time.
V. Hardware incompatibilities.
While they do their best to maintain cross-compatibility, there are still a few cases where a Cisco system using Unified MeetingPlace can be incompatible with very specific pieces of hardware. Cisco's wiki contains a useful compatibility matrix which will help you ensure all your hardware is compatible with the current software versions.
Other Sources For Help With A Cisco Phone System
If you need more specific help with your Cisco phones, here are a few other resources you can turn to:
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The official Cisco wiki
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Cisco's DIY Support Pages
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Official Cisco Community discussions
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Cisco's tech support center
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The experts here at Hummingbird Networks
Finally, of course, if you have a comment or concern about your Cisco phone system, you can always leave it here in our forum for our own networking community to read and address!
