VoIP Strides Ahead, But Many Still Unsure

March 28, 2007: VoIP may be getting more popular by the day, but its widespread adoption still hasn’t quelled reliability concerns.

According to a new study by Network Instruments, organisations still lack appropriate tools to monitor, manage and troubleshoot VoIP performance problems.

Canvassing 273 networking engineers across the US, the survey found that almost half of respondents had implemented VoIP technology yet 32 percent lacked the ability to monitor performance.

Nearly 50 percent of engineers were concerned about their ability to monitor the quality of VoIP service, 41 percent were unsure of their network's ability to handle the extra bandwidth consumption from VoIP calls and 36 percent were concerned with the reliability of their VoIP application during periods of heavy use.

“Many organisations adopt VoIP to save on telecom costs without realising how sensitive VoIP performance is to other applications running on the network,” said Charles Thompson, manager of sales engineering for Network Instruments. “The switch is often made without fully understanding the complexities of the technology as well as the high expectations users have of voice performance.

“The same may be said for the IT staff, who implement VoIP without having the proper equipment to monitor performance and ensure long-term success,” added Thompson.

The company claims that the main challenge with running VoIP across an enterprise network is its extreme sensitivity to delay, jitter, and packet loss compared with other network communication software. Email doesn’t suffer if the network is slow for example, whereas VoIP users can experience audio quality problems, calls dropping out and voice delays.

"Many organisations are unaware that most of these issues can be easily managed by deploying the latest generation of network analysis tools to manage and troubleshoot VoIP traffic and quality of service," said Douglas Smith, president and co-founder of Network Instruments. "Network teams frequently rely on default testing tools included with the VoIP equipment, which provide minimal insight into VoIP communication running over the network and fail to compare its performance with overall network performance. Instead, the IT staff should use analysis tools that provide detailed insight into both VoIP and overall network performance."

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