Good Quality VoIP Protocols

Are you looking to establish a voice over IP (VoIP ) network in your enterprise, or improve the quality of existing ones? Estimates are that as many as 85% or more of today's router based enterprise data networks are not prepared to be compatible with VoIP without modification. As a result, an enterprise's voice and data applications can undergo intolerable loss in quality.

How can you make sure that your network is living up to the requirements, both before and after deploying VoIP services? Given below are some very useful guidelines you can look up to before deploying VoIP in your network, or when you desire to better the quality of your network after deployment.

Whether choosing a vendor partner or testing and deploying the VoIP network yourself, ensure your tools provide granular diagnostics and reporting capabilities that enable you to efficiently troubleshoot all possible VoIP issues. Your tools should be utilizable throughout the complete VoIP deployment lifecycle, for both assessment and troubleshooting, implying that one tool can be employed to both identify the problem and correct it.

Network quality parameters like delay, jitter and loss, which influence the number of calls a network can handle, are linked with network design issues that range from what kind of network equipment you are using to whether your communications network is accessible across the street or across the country. The best way to estimate your VoIP call capacity is by simulating VoIP calls on the network, which will assist you in determining how many calls you can handle and still maintain good enough voice quality.

Estimating how many calls your network can deal with is only the beginning, especially if you get a surprisingly low mean opinion score (MOS) reading when handling a small number of VoIP calls. For example, when a Canadian financial institution was deploying VoIP , it realized that most of its locations were capable of dealing with as many as 24 VoIP calls--but one link was showing signs of backtracking at just six calls. While this location had the same 10-Mbps WAN link as the other locations, it was not delivering10-Mbps throughput. Communicating with the WAN service provider solved the problem.

When deploying a VoIP network, enterprises also should abstain from testing only the quality of the VoIP application. Because the various applications performing on an IP network affect each other, VoIP may negatively influence other applications that are currently performing on the network. Efficient VoIP testing should examine the full range of services performing across the enterprise.

Enterprise networks keep on changing all the time. Adding new applications, widening the network to new locations or boosting network usage can all potentially have a negative affect on voice quality. Ongoing testing proactively analyzes the influence of network changes.

Once you deploy VoIP in your data network, it becomes the most crucial application on your network. Turn off your e-mail server for 30 minutes and most people will not even realize. However, in the case of drop in process calls or being unable to provide dial tone, you will find that the users will not stand these things at all. Constructing your network prior to VoIP deployment, and monitoring it afterwards can help you a lot in ensuring IP telephony efficiently handles advanced telephony and data services across one network--instead of becoming a severe headache for you.

About the author: Datacraft is the leading independent IT services and solutions company in Asia Pacific. Datacraft combines an expertise in networking, security, Microsoft solutions, storage and contact centre technologies, with advanced skills in consulting, integration and managed services, to craft IT solutions for businesses.