Communications

VOIP – IP TELEPHONY:
VoIP or IP Telephony (IPT) is fast winning enterprise acceptance. With VoIP, voice and video traffic ride over your existing data network, eliminating the need for separate voice and data infrastructures—enabling new applications such as unified messaging and integrated voice and Web conferencing. Yet considerable barriers stand in the way of its promise for new, flexible ways to work and significant savings from consolidating services and infrastructure.

 It's All About Quality

Quality is a major concern. Data networks are unpredictable and suffer periodic congestion, degrading performance. While data can recover, voice has very tight quality requirements—with round trip latency under 150 ms. With so many applications contending for WAN bandwidth, VoIP quality suffers.

More Bandwidth Please!

VoIP consumes considerable bandwidth, demanding available capacity. Each VoIP phone call takes 30 Kbps to 80 Kbps of bandwidth, while video consumes 56 Kbps to 3 MB of capacity. This can be a problem, especially for organizations that aren’t certain how much bandwidth each of their current applications require.

LAN Meets WAN Congestion

LAN-WAN congestion becomes a barrier to high quality VoIP unless each call gets the resources it needs. Even when identifying voice or video, bandwidth cannot be guaranteed in Weighted Random Early Detection (WRED) queuing schemes.

Not Your Business

Consumer VoIP use is gaining ground. Instant messengers from Yahoo!®, Google®, AOL® and MSN®, for example, are VoIP-ready (and increasingly video). Even if unsanctioned, these programs definitely impact the network. They must be contained to ensure that sanctioned VoIP and other critical business applications get enough bandwidth.

Ready or Not

Assessing the readiness of your network is key to a successful VoIP deployment.
• Will the same WAN bandwidth today support your VoIP effort tomorrow?
• If not, can you borrow additional bandwidth from recreational applications?
• Or do you have to add capacity?
• What is the impact to your existing application?
• How well does VoIP perform on your WAN?

 
Inconsistent quality threatens the success of converged deployments. A Bit Torrent request, for example, can distort an otherwise clear video image.

 VoIP Solution: Picture Perfect

Realize the promise of your VoIP deployment. Overcome quality issues, assess readiness, ensure bandwidth, increase capacity and ultimately deliver top WAN application performance.

Get Network Ready
Advanced network and application monitoring can assess network readiness for VoIP deployment.
Determine:
• What applications run on your network with Layer 7 technologies
• How much bandwidth applications are taking
• Whether or not you need additional bandwidth
• Bandwidth allocation by capping recreational applications

Strike Up the Bandwidth
Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities can ensure each voice call gets the bandwidth it needs, per session or per call. Look to cap recreational or non-critical traffic to ensure that your VoIP applications get priority bandwidth.

Keep an Eye on Consumer VoIP
Discover and track the impact of consumer VoIP—like Skype®, Yahoo! and other IM-based voice applications—with Layer 7 technology. Once identified, you should be able to easily ensure QoS, regulatory compliance or limit bandwidth, according to your needs.

Pump Up WAN Capacity
Advanced compression algorithms provide low-latency, high-impact compression to increase WAN capacity and create room for VoIP implementations. In addition, specialized voice header compression and packing capabilities enable you to fit more calls in a given amount of bandwidth.