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We’ve all experienced it. Choppy, distorted or delayed voice are an unfortunate by-product of sending the human voice across digital networks over which we have limited or no control. Thankfully, technology has helped squeeze the best possible experience out of VoIP with more efficient codecs and, traffic prioritization. Our goal as network engineers is to maximize Quality of Experience (QoE) and minimize Number of Tickets, so we need all the tools we can get to assist.

The Meraki switching and AP families provides the perfect backbone on which to run VoIP, including our very own MC74 cloud managed phone, supporting 802.1p, DSCP and WMM. For site-to-site connections, even across the Internet, we provide SD-WAN functionality to automatically ensure selection of the best forwarding path for VoIP traffic.

Today we want to share three new capabilities specific to the MC74 which will help admins identify and troubleshoot VoIP issues.

The first of these is a dream come true for troubleshooters. Every call made on an MC74 is recorded in the Call Log, and now simply clicking on any call in that log will show its stats. Here’s an example, which clearly illustrates the loss and jitter for the duration of this call:

Meraki customers have benefitted from the ability to run remote packet captures for years: one of the most powerful troubleshooting tools in our kitbag. Now these packet captures can be grabbed directly from a Meraki phone. Perfect for those customers who have not yet upgraded to a full Meraki network.

Finally, for in-flight call issues, the phone user can be notified if network issues are impacting voice quality: useful because a less technical user may not be familiar with the issues which can impact Quality of Experience, and can then draw issues to the attention of the IT team.

A notice pops up on the screen, and the connectivity indicator in the upper left of the phone’s display will blink yellow.

Little by little, the Meraki phone is developing like every great Meraki product does, in response to the valuable feedback we receive daily from our customers. Our engineers are hard at work on more new features for MC, and we’ll be back to share those just as soon as they’re ready. In the meantime, please continue to contribute your ideas on how we can evolve this into the most user-friendly phone with the lowest operational costs on the market.