Dropped and Garbled audio with SpectraLink 8440 Phones

[steve_dreher]

I have a site with 95 SpectraLink 8440 phones and 80 APs with a ZD 3000 running 9.6.1.0.15. We experience dropped audio for up to 8 seconds and then the call will come back. The SpectraLink phone logs show very high Tx and Rx retries. I was told this ZD load addressed dropped audio issues with SpectraLink but we continue to have issues. The SpectraLink phones are at 4.3.0 which is also the latest software. The inside APs are on the 5 GHz band to reduce interference with a separate customer WiFi and the outside APs are on 2.4.

[matty_brown]

We're continuing to use 9.6.2.0.13 on our ZF7363's with statically assigned channels. We've also recently updated our SpectraLink 8440's to 4.6.1J.0034 and added "" to our site.cfg file.

Our phones are now working perfectly. (Hope I haven't just jinxed it!)

Is everyone else now happy with the call quality of their SpectraLink 8440's and Ruckus AP's?

[scott_moran_635]

Matty,

Are you using 2.4GHz or 5.GHz? Or both?

We're running Ruckus 9.7.1.0 build 17 and v4.6.1.0011 on our 8440's and the performance is still only fair > okay.

Did you find a major improvement once you upgraded the 8440's to 4.6.1J.0034?

Thanks,
Scott

[matty_brown]

Hi Scott

I've disabled 2.4GHz on our phones and only have sub-bands 1 and 2 enabled on the phones, which means that the 5GHz channels we had available to us were 36,40,44,48,52,56,60,64 (I'd previously found that the phones wouldn't connect to AP's on channels 100+, even if all sub-bands were enabled).

When we moved over to 5GHz last year we noticed a dramatic improvement.

The call quality was already good before updating to 4.6.1J.0034. The difference I noticed with this firmware was that calls are now going through more reliably and ringing straight away. Since we use Xarios Phone Manager, I used to be able to see a call coming in on the call banner on my PC up to 8 seconds before my phone started ringing!

Matty Brown

[scott_moran_635]

Hi Matty,

Thanks for the response.

We've found the voice quality far superior on 5GHz, but we have issues with the 8440's randomly being disconnected from the network - even when they have ample signal. It seems it's the roaming that's letting us down because anyone using the phone while they're stationary are affected to a much much lesser extent.

Would you care to share some screenshots of Ruckus config for your SIP wireless network? There are so many settings in there that can affect the handsets, it's hard to know where to start. Especially regarding CAC, because we've got conflicting documentation from Spectralink.

We've only been able to use sub-band 3 (in Australia), so I think all of our channels are 100+ but I'd have to double check. I wonder if that's a contributing factor for our roaming issue(s)?

Scott

[scott_moran_635]

Which codec are you using Matty?