VoIP network assessment

intro image More than half of organizations fail to assess their network prior to deploying VoIP. Use PROGNOSIS to assess the readiness of your network for the unique demands of IP telephony.

To ensure a smooth transition to Voice over IP (VoIP), you must ensure that your data network is capable of meeting the unique demands of IP telephony. Many organizations overlook the critical step of pre-deployment network assessment and later pay for it through poor performance, substandard voice quality, poor service levels and insufficient or non-optimized capacity.

A network assessment tool, such as PROGNOSIS IP Telephony Assessor will assist you to ensure the suitability of your data network. By simulating actual voice traffic, rather than relying on theoretical metrics, network assessment can reveal deficiencies in a network that might otherwise appear capable of handling the traffic, and potentially remove the need for a costly pilot deployment.

Industry analyst Robin Gareiss of Nemertes Research tells us, “Our recommendations are first and foremost, conduct a baseline network assessment. We see that many times companies don’t do this and they end up realizing they should have.”

This is just the situation that David Wall, chief engineer with David Wall Enterprises managed to avoid when he assessed the data network of a large distributed funds management company. When major network faults were revealed during testing, Wall was able to rectify them through the simple upgrade of a minor component.

Wall says, “There’s no point in conducting a network assessment if the tool you use can’t simulate ‘actual’ voice traffic. And that simulated voice traffic assessment must be run over the entire course of operations. So if your call and data usage peaks daily, weekly, or monthly, you need to assess over those peak times as well as those quiet times. The tool I use? PROGNOSIS IP Telephony Assessor.”