For a customer we are currently deploying a new wireless network infrastructure with voice over wireless (VoWLAN) as primary use-case. In this deployment we use Flex-connect with 2700 / 3700 AP’s, a virtual WLC and Cisco’s own 7925G wireless phones.

In the testing phase we discovered that the Cisco 7925G phones showed that while making a voice call, the received wireless traffic where received as “best effort”. Usually this means some wrong QoS configuration on the wired side, so we created some traces to see if the QoS values (ToS in this case) of the audio streams where in place and correct. Crazy enough this was the case, so from that point we knew that the problem was really occurring on the wireless side.

We created some wireless traces and we saw that the wireless QoS values (IEEE 802.11e UP) of the downstream audio where “0” (best-effort), while those values really should be “6” (voice) based on the ToS values of the packets. As test we created a new SSID with no encryption at all and things worked fine. In the end we found out that enabling Flexconnect local authentication was the root cause of this problem so we opened a TAC case to get it fixed.

After some mail contact with TAC this problem was being passed on to the escalation guys for the wireless business. They added this input on this bug. Until today it has not been fixed, so watch out if you are running this kind of setup!

Update 8 October: Cisco finally fixed it in AirOS release 8.120.6 🙂