VoIP Network Readiness: Voice VLAN Design and PoE Switch Sizing
Most call-quality tickets trace back to three network decisions made before the first phone ever shipped. This guide walks MSPs and IT admins through building VoIP network readiness the right way: putting voice on its own VLAN, marking and trusting DSCP EF across every hop, and sizing a PoE switch by power budget instead of port count. It also covers WAN bandwidth planning by codec, a deployment checklist, and a troubleshooting matrix mapped to the most common symptoms. The approach is vendor-neutral by design, so it applies whether the access layer runs Cisco, Ubiquiti, Aruba, or anything else, and it is the design layer the firewall-specific guides in this series assume is already in place.
