Voice Management

A recent Tech News World article by Amit Kapoor, director of strategic technology advancement at voice management leader Tone Software (News - Alert), shows how to tackle VoIP quality issues in your converged voice environment by finding the “weakest link” in the VoIP chain.

As Kapoor notes, call servers become the fall guys for VoIP quality and voice management issues – the part of the network it’s often easiest to blame, even though the real issue is just as likely to be found within the complex underlying network infrastructure, capacity and network traffic levels occurring at the time of quality degradation. Meanwhile the support team is haring off after the poor call server.

Kapoor offers some suggestions based on his considerable experience in the industry.

Eliminate barriers between the voice and data domains. Sometimes, with converged voice and data, what Kapoor calls “the monolithic support approach of different voice and network teams using separate tools” is as bad as the problem itself. The voice team frequently has no visibility or control over network issues, and network teams can’t see the impact their changes to routing and traffic priority will have on VoIP call quality.

In fact, Kapoor goes so far as to say, “These visibility barriers across the voice and data domains are a primary cause of the chronic poor VoIP quality and service levels that plague converged communications users.” Knock these barriers down, he says, in favor of a holistic management scheme so your VoIP operational support teams can see the true cause of poorly performing calls during any specific time frame, the network issues impacting these VoIP quality and service conditions and the physical infrastructure issues contributing to the quality degradation.

Use deep VoIP QoS metrics to find the right answers. You’re probably inclined to simply trust Network Mean Opinion Scores averaged over time as a method of managing QoS levels, Kapoor says, adding that “these averages can actually hide the true VoIP quality problems in real-world deployments.” If a call degrades at a key point in a conversation those affected don’t care that quality was good the other 98.5 percent of the time.

Kapoor gives examples of what he calls “a set of 50 core quality-of-service statistics” you can use instead, including listening quality and jitter buffer overrun estimates and taking into consideration both active and passive monitoring and the analytics “necessary to provide this deep view, including low-level application and transport layer statistics on a per-call basis.”

And finally, Kapoor urges to be proactive as VoIP traffic changes and expands.

“The converged VoIP environment is constantly changing,” he said.

Voice traffic levels, new applications, network configurations, they all change and affect VoIP quality. Get away from firefighting issues, start using your VoIP QoS analytics and network performance metrics to get insight into what Kapoor calls “capacity barriers that are looming and warrant network upgrades, as well as call patterns that show where changes must be implemented to deal with stubborn, recurring quality and performance issues.”