/mcpWhere to Start? Once the issue has been identified via users that report issues, Call Detail Records (CDRs) or some other means, it is important to gather data to help isolate it. Voice quality issues typically fall into one of three categories: network related (includes Gateway (GW), and PSTN issues), phone model/firmware related, or equipment (ex. headset) related. It is important to gather data to determine which of these categories the voice quality issues are a result of. This data allows a comparison between phones without voice quality issues and phones with voice quality issues to find the differences between them, which is a crucial step to solve many voice quality issues. Step 1. The first step to isolate the voice quality issue is to find out exactly which users experience it and talk to them, either in person or over the phone, to get an accurate description of it. If there are a large number of users that report the issue talk to a sample (maybe 5-10) of them to get an accurate description of the symptoms. If only a few users report the issue, talk to the people around them to see if they also experience any problem as the issue can be more widespread than it appears as many users won't report it. Step 2. Take note of the physical location (ex. Site A, Floor 2), user name (of the user's the phone), directory numbers (DNs), phone model (ex 8865), phone firmware (ex. 11.5.1) and IP addresses of the phones that experience voice quality issues. Create a spreadsheet with this information sorted by physical location. The 30 minutes (or less) it takes to create this spreadsheet when you start to troubleshoot, could save hours, or even days of troubleshoot time. Step 3. Once the spreadsheet has been created take a look at the list of phones and see what they have in common and what is different about them and other phones that don't have voice quality issues. After that you can realize that all phones with the issue are in the same building and on the same floor, you can realize that the phones that have issues are connected to switches which were recently upgraded or you can see that all of the phones that have the issue are on a particular firmware.