Hosted VoIP

Streamcore, a provider of application visibility and automated control for business-critical networks across the world, has published a list of critical points to be considered in order to successfully deploy Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). These tips have been issued in the interest of demonstrating to organizations how VoIP phones are not the culprit behind dropped or delayed calls. Instead, the problems can be resolved by the organization ensuring that their network can handle the traffic congestion from all other sources and properly prioritize VoIP traffic.

 

With the growing popularity of VoIP in organizations, it is important to ensure quality calls without disruption from other critical applications that share bandwidth including video conferencing, file transfers, Citrix, or email. When VoIP is unable to receive the necessary bandwidth, calls become noticeably patchy and get delayed, ultimately negatively impacting the organization’s daily business. When several applications are being run together on a network, organizations need to step up the bandwidth allotted to handle applications.

 

Streamcore’s solutions monitor, accelerate, and report application and network performance. Their patented Application Behavior Based Acceleration (ABBA) technology allows the delivery of global, real-time, automated network visibility and network control over new converged WAN and wireless networks. Through these solutions, service providers offer consistent and predictable application performance, enabling them to manage and provision next generation revenue-generating service offerings.

 

The following points were listed as important for optimizing VoIP performance.

 

VoIP traffic needs to be prioritized over any other applications that are less critical to the company’s business.

 

In the interest of better call quality, network and application visibility is important for organizations that receive reports on the network and for measuring quality. The company’s IT department would then have the ability to track bandwidth usage and monitor the quality of applications to determine where and how VoIP quality is adversely affected.

 

VoIP performance problems can be identified through the real-time ability to fine-tune application delivery (intended to guarantee that VoIP traffic has the highest priority depending on network conditions).

 

Monitoring a call’s MOS at the user level, gives organizations a better insight into VoIP success, enabling them to adjust it to ensure that the MOS score is always at the optimum level.