A helpdesk manager at a financial company has received multiple reports from employees and customers that their phone calls sound metallic on the voice system. The helpdesk has been using VoIP lines…

SIP session tagging and QoS can prioritize voice packets but do not physically isolate voice from data traffic, so heavy data traffic can still introduce jitter and degrade call quality.

A dedicated VLAN for voice traffic segregates VoIP packets from general data network traffic, eliminating bandwidth competition that causes jitter and packet loss leading to audio distortion. Because the encryption has been in place for years without complaint, the root cause is network congestion rather than encryption overhead, and VLAN isolation is the best long-term solution to prevent recurrence.

Lowering the encryption setting does not address the root cause of audio degradation, which is packet loss or jitter from congestion, not processing latency introduced by encryption.

Traffic shaping limits or queues specific flows but does not provide the full logical isolation of a dedicated VLAN, leaving voice packets still vulnerable to contention from other traffic types.