A. Rama's questions

I recently bought a TPLINK TL-SG2424P 24 ports POE Managed Switch.

At the moment I'm going to use it with only a handful of access points, no more than 4 or 5, at least until the end of the year when we will change building and we will need quite a lot more.

The question is : there is a better way to choose which 4 of the 24 ports to use in the switch, either with respect to data throughput/latency or with poe performance?

From what I remember from college, I'm guessing that by using ports as separated as possible I should achieve higher latencies but better throughput but what about POE?

There's a way to reduce consumption / heating? Should I be worried about it when I will be using 20 or 22 PDs with it?

Thanks for any help.

I am a computer scientist and I'm working as sysadmin of a small firm where I've been managing also the telephone system that my predecessor put in place.

Albeit I don't really have the skill set for doing this, until now it was enough.

Since the last few months however we are experiencing a strange phenomenon on one of our lines: after a couple of minutes of use (but not every time) the audio quality suddenly deteriorates and the outside party cannot hear us unless we talk very loudly. This usually happens on inbound calls.

A brief description of our setup: we have two dual-channel isdn land lines with two different operators over which we also have an adsl internet line each.

The first operator gives us two POTS numbers on its line and these work perfectly both inbound and outbound.

The second operator instead gives us an ip telephone number on its line and this is the one we are having problems with.

Now, I know what you are thinking, the ip setup is obviously rubbish. Well, I'm quite expert in network administration and I'm relatively sure that it isn't. The line works as it should and the operator confirms it.

Still, while answering calls from the ip lines my users laments poor quality of audio every other day. I admit that I didn't believe them at first (I've been unable to reproduce the fact myself) but the accounts were too many and they came from independent sources, some of which are highly trusted and unlikely to prank the poor, overworked sysadmin.

So, here's the question for you all: give me a way for me to automatically test a phone line audio quality without having to subject myself to listening in to all the calls of some of my users for a couple of days or two (which would badly impact my already too full todo list).

What I'm hoping for is a way for me to use my android phone to call the ip line and without having to wait for it get a warning the moment the audio quality drops, so that I can draw some reliable statistics on how often this happens and I can demonstrated to the operator technicians that I'm not wasting their time (like they more or less explicitly told me last time I called for help on this).

I hope I'm asking this in the right community. If not, have my apologies and please point me to the right one.