VoIP - Pt. 1 - Site Surveys And Benchmarks

Widespread VoIP adoption is underway and many organizations are merging their voice and data networks together to reduce costs. But as with any new technology, VoIP can also introduce potential problems. Because of the sensitivity of VoIP to network performance and delay, it’s critical to understand and constantly monitor VoIP as well as overall network performance. Managing and understanding specific network and VoIP metrics will improve your ability to accurately diagnose issues and resolve performance problems before they lead to user complaints or downtime.

We’ll be looking at a few of the major issues that can impact VoIP performance as well as important metrics that you can monitor to better understand the overall health of your VoIP network and pinpoint VoIP issues.

Site Surveys and Establishing Network Performance Benchmarks
Typically when implementing a new technology, such as VoIP, many network administrators take one of two approaches with VoIP. Many network managers install new technologies and then address performance problems as they arise. Others anticipate that the addition of VoIP will increase their bandwidth needs, and as a result upgrade their bandwidth capacity.

These steps, however, may not effectively address the potential VoIP problems. Deployment issues can cause users to resist using the new technology. In addition the disruption of VoIP services directly impacts the bottom line by halting business activities. Conducting a site survey before installing VoIP services, understanding your overall bandwidth demand and application performance, and establishing benchmarks for acceptable network performance are critical for determining how the network will handle the new VoIP traffic and identifying any changes that need to be made to effectively support VoIP communications.

An analysis tool that tracks, stores, and analyzes long-term activity will define what is considered normal for a particular VoIP environment. The insights on network and application performance gained from the initial survey site and by continual monitoring of the added VoIP traffic will help you to intelligently configure alarms on the monitoring tool to alert you when VoIP performance deviates from the norm. It is also important to maintain a database of call detail records (CDRs) from which you can generate reports for management or service providers.

Understanding overall network performance through site surveys and benchmarking is critical to being able to quickly identify anomalies, troubleshooting problems, and ensure the success of a VoIP installation.

[Stephen Brown and Charles Thompson of Network Instruments]

[tags]voip,delay,site survey,benchmark,network performance,voip metric,cdr,call detail record[/tags]