A recent white paper from Elfiq Networks titled, “Voice over IP Networks: Ensuring quality through proactive link management” deals with an important issue for bandwidth management -- Voice over IP (VoIP) networks have any number of advantages over traditional telephony technologies, and unlike traditional telephony’s high level of availability, performance and reliability, VoIP implementations depend on Internet-based links and private WAN links. This raises challenges.
Bandwidth management pros know that voice traffic is more sensitive to network delays than data traffic, as the study finds, which leads to issues of link availability, link saturation, LAN quality, LAN provisioning and quality of service (QoS): “These items may degrade the user experience and raise costs through dropped conversations, damaged reputations, as well as lost opportunities and sales.”
The challenge with IP telephony is to maintain an acceptable level of service and quality, and the connectivity strategy will directly impact the end result. When building the strategy, the following items need to be qualified: required bandwidth, number of links, types of links and link
management.
The paper outlines three ways of dealing with this issue. First, the required bandwidth must be estimated for current needs and the foreseeable future. Bandwidth is the key, and each active session used will require its own allocation. This metric should be calculated based on the slowest direction of the links
Second, the number of links will depend on the required number of VoIP sessions, where a good practice is to have links that will accommodate the total number of sessions to optimally transport traffic.
Third, link diversification needs to be taken into account. Operating with a single link technology
strategy will enable a single point of failure, which may cause regular downtime.
The paper deals in-depth with this topic and other key bandwidth management issues, and is well worth the read. Voice over IP network projects are dependent on their ability to communicate with external sources, and organizations need to plan to meet user demand and telecommunications links, in order to ensure that the available bandwidth will enable optimal operations.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Jamie Epstein