Is Your Network Ready for Voice-over-IP?

For most organizations today, it’s less a matter of if and when, but more a matter of how to embrace IP telephony communications. Since 2005, when the balance tipped and more IP telephony systems were shipped than traditional time-division multiplexed (TDM) phone systems, VoIP has become the technology of the present and the future. In thousands of installations worldwide, VoIP communications are daily enhancing collaboration, increasing productivity and lowering costs. But even networks that have been optimized to handle large and complex data workloads may not be ready for an IP telephony implementation. What characterizes a Voice Ready Network?

Ensuring Quality

To carry on business effectively, users must be able to conduct conversations as if they were in the same room with the person on the other end of the line. With the latest codecs, audio quality on IP phones now surpasses what was previously possible on analog or even non-IP digital phones. But to attain business-level clarity and immediacy, the network must deliver sufficient bandwidth to support the voice traffic and provide the quality of service prioritization that prevents latency, “jitter” and prolonged call setups.

Just as important, the network must be able to reliably deliver a dial tone across the entire organization, over both wired and wireless installations. Phone users have long been accustomed to virtually 100% uptime. Many businesses cannot tolerate interruptions in their telephony service, losing money by the second when calls fail to get through. So a Voice Ready Network must provide high-availability, with the capability to support additional survivability features such as resilient links, uninterruptible power or back-up systems if required.

Additionally, a high-quality Voice Ready Network needs to be amenable to the strategic vision and budgetary constraints of the organization. In a company planning to implement a call center, the network should support that capability in advance to ensure functionality and keep implementation costs in check. If a business unit expects to open another district office, the network should be architected to sustain employee productivity with telephony survivability features that can withstand even a WAN failure. Or if video-based training will eventually be part of the picture, the network installed today ought to be able to accommodate the bandwidth and low-latency demands that quality video signals will entail tomorrow.

Guaranteeing Security

The various threats to business data networks - ranging from Trojan horses and worms to distributed denial-of-service attacks and intellectual property theft - are well known to IT professionals. But voice traffic is just as susceptible to attacks as data traffic, with most incursions occurring from within the firewall. And wireless networks present additional points of vulnerability. To protect business-critical communications of all types, the network must be capable of defending itself at the infrastructure and application levels by identifying threats and removing them while maintaining network integrity. Network performance must also be protected against traffic congestion generated by peer-to-peer, instant messaging and spyware activity.

Promoting Simplicity

The Voice Ready Network not only needs to be simple to manage, it must be able to scale as the business grows. This requires an intrinsically simple architecture that distributes intelligence where it is needed with minimal hands-on manual configuration. Communications are becoming increasingly mobile every day, but mobility means more than untethered phones and ear buds. It also involves converging wireline and wireless technologies and delivering critical applications to employees at home, in remote locations or on the road. That is why the network needs to be mobile-ready as well as voice-ready.

Technologies such as those based on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) will be particularly important in simplifying the process of extending full telephony privileges to users as they travel or roam the building. Then there is the matter of migration. Most managers prefer a migration strategy that is really more of a transition strategy. That is, they want to leave as little of their legacy network behind as possible when they move to a voice-capable infrastructure. This requires a thorough network assessment and implementation plan. Plus, it means installing voice-capable solutions with the flexibility to support a wide range of applications and a full complement of industry standards.

Summary

Drawing from a broad, standards-based portfolio of converged network solutions, a Voice Ready Network can:

• Guarantee enterprise-level reliability and availability.

• Protect network resources and users from internal and external attacks.

• Integrate with legacy solutions through a standards-based architecture.

• Support converged services-including conferencing and multimedia communications-with wire-speed performance.

• Deliver high-quality audio with prioritized traffic controls.

• Provide a practical power source with Power over Ethernet capabilities.

• Facilitate communications and business activities for mobile workers.

• Comprehensively monitor and manage main and branch networks.

• Easily scale to accommodate future growth. IT

Mike Leo is Director, Convergence Marketing, Convergence Business Unit, 3Com Corporation. For more information, visit the company at www.3com.com.

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