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 VoIP's real time requirements. If you don't plan and test for real time voice traffic during the critical step of pre-deployment network assessment, you may pay for it later through poor performance, substandard voice quality, and the possibility of breaching service levels.

A network assessment tool, such as Prognosis IP Telephony Assessor will assist you in ensuring the suitability of your data network for voice. Simulating actual voice traffic, network assessment can reveal deficiencies in a network that might otherwise appear quite capable of handling non real time traffic.

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. 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.”