>We have VOIP wan and in one office experiencing warning messages on the phones of low ban width. What tools are available to monitor what is going on to try to identify if data transmissions are causing some of the trouble? We are told that voice takes presidence over data, but now the finger is being pointed to data traffic as being the problem.
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>Hopefully,someone can share what tools are out there to monitor and identify what is going on (at a reasonalble price)

One free network monitoring tool is WireShark (formerly Ethereal): http://www.wireshark.org/

With any monitoring tool, the trick is finding someone who knows how to use it and interpret the results.

If your network is set up such that voice traffic has precedence over data, it's probably implementing Quality of Service (QoS). For this to work:

- it must be configured properly
- ALL devices on the network that use the busy link need to implement it

QoS is installed by default in the XP networking stack, don't know if it is in Vista. Servers may not have it installed by default, so if you have any server traffic over the link that could account for it.

All it takes is one hotdog who doesn't want to wait for his downloads, and turns off or removes QoS on his system, to cause problems.