IT professionals have been examining their networks in critical detail to uncover hidden or latent problems since the dawn of networking, with the ultimate goal of improving delivery of mission-critical business applications. This discipline of troubleshooting has grown in importance in the age of VoIP with multimedia applications, global networks, and new protocols. This session will discuss how gaining greater visibility into the network is leading organizations to better management of their converged networks and optimized delivery of all business and voice services. Other topics will include setting QoS policies, data collection/troubleshooting and how applications impact each other when traversing the same network segments.

Throwing voice packets onto a LAN and hoping for the best is easy. Deploying high-quality VoIP is a bit more challenging. This session will address the need for service quality management and how unleashing the network infrastructure, enforcing a centralized policy for end-to-end QoS, and controlling network resources on a proactive basis can deliver high levels of quality for IP communications. The session will also address related issues of bandwidth shaping and equalizing technology that are designed to enable IT professionals to manage their enterprise voice and data network.

The roll-out of VoIP presents a quandary. The reality of high expectations for voice quality combined with the challenges of running voice on IP networks opens up the risk of serious business failure for the network operations team. How can an enterprise CIO ensure the delivery of QoS that VoIP services demand? This session will look at the specific QoS requirements of VoIP, where those issues arise in the network, and how to measure and deliver high levels of QoS. The presenters will also look at the Ethernet edge and Ethernet core to see how other network elements impact QoS.

This presentation explains the typical issues affecting the performance of Voice over IP, focusing on some of the more challenging problems such as echo and transient loss/ jitter due to network congestion. The new VoIP performance management framework addresses many of these issues allowing network managers to cost effectively monitor large and diverse networks and quickly identify problem sources. The standards based performance management framework is introduced and practical applications given for both service provider and enterprise networks.