Voip for small office on Meraki Go? What's your experience?

[jake123]

Looking at Meraki Go for a small office deployment which will have 7 voip phone users (though not all on the phone at the same time). Internet is 1GB fiber so of course no bandwidth problem there. Wondering if anyone using a meraki go network with a similar size office can share their experience?

As I understand it, QoS isn't possible without dedicated ports (no voice vlan, no ability to prioritize a device by its mac address). Is that correct?

[Franco244]

While I don't have VLANs configured for anything (use this at home) you can configure access ports for switches, which offers Auto Voice VLAN. That said, I'm not sure if QoS is automatically applied to those ports or not.

[AscendLLC]

Would like to hear if anyone has done this.  I just deployed the system in a small business and don't know how to configure for VOIP service.  Outbound calls are fine, but not inbound.

[Franco244]

• Review your VOIP provider's required configuration. Are to able to make the needed configs? Ports? 
• If you take a handset to a different network, does it work? Home network? 
• Are there firewall rules blocking inbound traffic at all? Is the MGO appliance doing it? 
• Are you able to get a packet capture (harder on MGO) 

[AscendLLC]

I'm still working on getting up to speed on all this - what's MGO appliance?  I am going to review VOIP providers required configuration in the morning.  I'm assuming I need to allow an inbound connection through the Meraki Go Gateway device?  I don't have another network to test it on.  They originally had a Edgemarc 2900e device that I think may have been doing some of the configuration, but couldn't telnet into it as someone changed the default password, and not documented anywhere.  :(.

[Franco244]

MGO - short for Meraki Go. Is your VOIP system on premise, or cloud hosted? 

[AscendLLC]

Got it - MGO.  Thanks!  Yes that’s the only appliance I have external facing is MGO.  Yes it is cloud hosted. So I assume talking with them there is something on the MGO I need to configure to get this to work. 

[jk128]

@AscendLLC 

OP here on a new account bc I got locked out of my previous cisco sso ID 😄 

Need more info to help you:

1. What exactly is the problem you are having? No audio on inbound voip calls? Or just poor quality?

2. Who is your hosted voip carrier?

If it's poor quality, there's not much reason it would only impact inbound calls.

If it's one way audio or no audio then you may want to contact Meraki Go support to find out if there's a way to "trigger" or "open" some specific TCP & UDP ports which your voip carrier would need to tell you. Most common ones for voip are UDP 5060-5090. To my knowledge, the GX20 doesn't have a "SIP ALG" feature which some small biz/home routers have that interferes with cloud voip calling.

We have an MGO GX20 and MGO switches powering our office network with 9 voip endpoints on a 150mbps cable connection with no quality issues. Typically 3-4 users on calls max at a time. No special QOS or port triggering was required. We're using Webex Cloud Calling and 8800 series cisco phones. In evaluation before install, we also tried Zoom Phone voip, and no issues with that either.

[AscendLLC]

Thanks for the reply and info.  After more investigation this morning with cloud provider for voip it seems like it was on their end.  All is working fine now.  I need to get schooled up on how this voip works though as I don’t feel comfortable if there is an issue.  I didn’t open anything on the GX20 or configure anything special and it seems to work.