General Approaches to Troubleshooting Voice Quality Issues

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 will reach end of support on January 9, 2018. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

Voice quality issues are frequently identified by end users, but you can also detect them by using Monitoring Server. Monitoring Server provides device details in call quality reports, which can be useful for tracking trends on a specific device version with known issues. Effectively dealing with voice quality issues includes the following:

• Determining when the issue occurs. An audio issue can occur during a PC-to-PC call, a PC-to-PSTN call, an audio/video (A/V) conference, or any combination of these activities.

• Determining whether the source of the issue is the computer network, the PSTN, or one or more devices.

Effective troubleshooting of voice quality issues requires an understanding of your deployment and how the components in your deployment can affect voice quality, as well identifying a specific issue (that is, generally a user-reported issue) and the likely cause of it.

To identify a voice quality issue, you progressively isolate its source, including identifying the types of voice communications that are affected and determining whether the cause is located in the computer network, the PSTN, or a device. Audio issues can be caused at any point in the communication path. To determine the specific cause, you need to isolate where in the path the issue is arising.