Is Your Network Voice-Ready? Four Steps to Take to Prepare

If you’re not already running Voice over IP (VoIP) on your network then chances are you are planning on it in the next twelve months. That is what nearly 70% of IT executives had to say in a recent Network World survey. This comes as no surprise to us as more and more of our clients are coming to us with the news: “We’ve made the decision to implement VoIP. What do we need to do to get ready?” Of course, we welcome the news and applaud the proactive step of planning ahead.

So what do you need to do to get ready? The first step is to understand how VoIP works and how it will impact your network, or rather, how your network will impact VoIP. Users will expect the same sound quality and reliability that they are accustomed to with their existing system. Because VoIP is the conversion of sounds into digital packets placed onto your data network and back into sounds at the other end, timing and delivery is everything. If the packets show up late or not at all, call quality diminishes and you’ve failed to provide an acceptable replacement for the old PBX.

Bottlenecks and congestion on your network will severely impact the delivery of your time-sensitive voice packets. My recommended second step is to start monitoring your network. Implementing a network monitoring tool ahead of the VoIP project will give you time to understand your network and baseline performance metrics. We like to know what types of traffic are on a network so we can use this information for future classification. Once the network monitoring is in place, you’ll be able to spot potential problem areas before voice is introduced and tune the network in advance. You’ll also have time to find those slow or congested links and take corrective action.

The third step I give clients is to take a look at the network and determine how fault-tolerant it is. For most of my clients, voice is a mission-critical application and it must be available at levels much higher than any other application. This usually means adding redundant links to access-layer switches and sometimes duplicating core switches.

An assumption that many IT managers make is that a network running VoIP is the same as any other network and thus network staff don’t need any training. The fact is that VoIP brings many new concepts and technologies to your network and requires additional training for most network staff. This helps assure that the network can be maintained and monitored for optimal performance.

Some of you may be wondering when I am going to mention Quality of Service (QoS). Well, the fourth step is not until you’ve walked through the above steps when you can start talking about QoS. And we’ll save that discussion for a future column.