VoIP and IP audit
South West Communications Group provides businesses with the opportunity to make cost savings with VoIP and to take advantage of the real-time unified communications applications it supports.
As businesses look to make savings in their communications overheads, many may turn towards the IP telephony as one way of achieving cost effectiveness. A converged voice and data network infrastructure eliminates the costs of supporting and maintaining separate networks as well as offering significant savings on call costs by virtue of sending Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). South West Communications Group has significant expertise in installing voice solutions over existing local area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN) infrastructures helping organisations to maximize their investment.
A converged network can also support the deployment of unified communications whereby users can access messages of all types (including email, voicemail, and faxes) in a single inbox. Such sophisticated software can also provide remote email access via phone, voice and video conferencing, document sharing and intelligent rich presence that allows staff to instantly see the availability of colleagues. This latest technology can promote an increase in productivity among staff using these real-time communications tools and can help reduce administrative overheads.
However, before any business considers taking advantage of these communications benefits, it needs to have a clear understanding of the impact it will have and ascertain its network’s integrity and its capability to support voice.
South West Communications Group undertakes network IP audits to determine the suitability of existing infrastructures to support voice calls and to devise the most cost-effective route to bring about change in a planned and methodical way. South West Communications Group specialises in the development of communication strategies that help to overcome legacy network issues when upgrading from traditional telephony to modern VoIP networks.
Why an IP audit is important
It is important to know how the addition of VoIP would affect a business’s network in terms of the quality of calls and the speed of data transfer. It is better to test for any potential problems beforehand rather than making assumptions and being subject to unpleasant surprises after an investment has been made.
More bandwidth is often the solution to network problems, but just adding more bandwidth does not necessarily solve VoIP problems. It is the quality of the connection and not the speed that poses many of the problems with dropped calls, poor voice quality, and so forth. In fact, because of its sensitivity, VoIP can be the first indicator of network problems, which have hitherto been transparent.
What an IP audit involves
South West Communications Group IP audit service conducts pre-deployment baseline assessments to simulate voice traffic on the network. This service is designed to help determine whether deficiencies exist that businesses need to address before deploying VoIP. The assessment may show that a network is ready for VoIP or that a few key components need to be changed. In some cases, companies find that they may need to completely redesign their network to support VoIP and may require new routers, switches or a change in protocol.
A test session period for an IP audit is selected to ensure that South West Communications Group’s team of specialist engineers capture a realistic period of time that encompasses normal or busy network usage. In order to gather the information required for a network audit, test calls are made using the existing network from strategic points within the LAN or WAN.
The traffic is then modified to simulate the varying loads and operational criteria found within a shared network. This simulation measures the voice quality under these conditions. The key criteria measured that most effect the operation of the network are delay, jitter and packet loss:
Delay - Is experienced if the network becomes congested. This can be caused by the existing network design or insufficient available bandwidth.
Jitter - Is also caused by congestion, and is defined by variations between the arrival times of the voice packets arriving at their destination, thus giving the appearance of the voice being broken up.
Packet loss - Is the complete loss of traffic and it can be caused by several factors; the most common being network congestion. This is usually caused by insufficient bandwidth or poor network design.
The resulting data is then analysed and a formal report submitted with details of the findings regarding the strength and resilience of the network and its suitability to take telephony traffic across it.
This report also makes recommendations as to the actions required if necessary to upgrade the network infrastructure. At this point, South West Communications Group’s professional consultants are poised to design a more resilient solution that addresses all of issues the audit has highlighted.
The alternative
If the audit reveals the existing network cannot support VoIP, an alternative is to deploy a separate network dedicated to VoIP components. This can be achieved with an entirely separate physical network or via using “virtual” local area network (VLAN) technology to separate the voice and data networks.
Another reason for separating networks is security. VoIP is vulnerable to the same attacks, intrusions, and security threats as data networks and if businesses have VoIP and data traffic combined on the same network, an attack on one can bring down the other. It is highly inconvenient when email is inaccessible when a network is down but if both email and telephone communications are unavailable, businesses typically suffer huge interruption and potentially lost revenue.
Bandwidth considerations may also lead to separating the voice and data networks. If a company’s existing network does not have the bandwidth to support VoIP, installing a separate network for VoIP is a solution. Where networks are converged, South West Communications Group recommends the deployment of VLANs to separate VoIP and data as best practice for securing VoIP networks.
Some businesses may also be more suited to separate networks due to industry or government mandates that determine how secure data has to be on a business’s network.
