I'm speaking at VoiceCon San Francisco 2008 on the topic of Troubleshooting in Converged Networks. That's a fancy title to say that I'll be talking about VoIP troubleshooting. There are three excellent speakers this time around: Steve Guthrie of CA, Mike Hollier of Psytechnics, and me. The moderator is David Yedwab of Market Strategy and Analytics Partners.
I did a similar talk at Voicecon Spring 2008 in Orlando and the slides are posted on the Netcordia web site under Resources/Webinars. I noticed that the last time I gave this talk, most of the audience was taking notes during my part of the presentation. I focus on real things that you can monitor and do to determine that voip problems exist and how to address them in concrete ways. That's why people were taking notes. Like them, I was tired of presentations that talked in such general terms that I couldn't take any action items or ideas back to work with me. So my presentation focuses on real symptoms and their causes and what you can do to address them. Of course, there's a limit to what I can cover in a 15-20 minutes (three speakers in an hour). I'm talking with the VoiceCon folks about doing an hour-long troubleshooting session where I can talk about problems in more detail and cover more types of problems.
A good example is echo and its causes. An attendee at a past presentation came up to me after the session and asked more specific questions about the sources of echo. Seems that he had an echo problem that had been bugging him for some time. We discussed several potential sources of echo and how to go about trying to eliminiate it.
I later found another potential source of echo while talking with some of the folks at Chesapeake Netcraftsmen. There are some versions of DSPs that have buggy code and that generate echo on their own when you're using a DSP to do transcoding or for a conference call. The fix is new code for the DSP (assuming that the problem is rectified with new code and doesn't need new hardware).
If you're at VoiceCon, stop by and say hello or participate with your own description of the best VoIP troubleshooting problem you've encountered.
-Terry