Voice and Video over IP › VoIP Performance on the Network

VoIP Performance on the Network

Many businesses lose sales opportunities when the phones go down for even a few minutes each month. VoIP traffic requires premium handling for the following reasons:

• Network users are accustomed to excellent performance from their telephone service, which has been excellent since they first picked up a telephone in their homes. They notice, and probably complain, when the quality of their VoIP calls dips even slightly.
• VoIP is a real-time application. As such, it is sensitive to latency, jitter, and packet loss. The network infrastructure is not designed to carry real-time application traffic.

VoIP still behaves like an emerging technology. Standards are still adopted and challenged. Multiple vendors still sell components that do not work together. These factors can create major application performance issues on converged networks. As a result, even a limited VoIP deployment requires ongoing, VoIP-specific monitoring, frequent call quality evaluation, trending, and troubleshooting.