By Sue Bradshaw, Technology Writer,
Ask a selection of people to explain what QoS means to them and chances are everyone will have a slightly different perspective. One person might say it gives control over network resources allowing a network to be managed from a business, rather than a technical, perspective.
Another might explain that it ensures that time-sensitive and mission-critical applications have the resources they require, while allowing other applications access to the network. And if you’re the person managing VoIP costs, one of your aims is likely to be taking the guesswork out of calculating capacity requirements while still ensuring quality goals can be met.
Specialist VoIP management allows you to monitor QoS in real time, close to real time, and over time to address the quality requirements of the business, the operations team, service providers and end users. Irrespective of whether quality information is taken from the RTCP stream, CDRs or via SNMP you’ll need to know how delay, variations in delay and dropped packets affect the quality of VoIP delivery.
Having this information means you can uncover patterns of unacceptable voice quality and narrow problems down to particular groups of phones, regions, locations, route patterns and time of day. As well as allowing you to make informed decisions and resolve issues before too many users are affected, information about call loading by trunk group and gateway allows you to optimize, decommission or upgrade capacity while still delivering quality of service.
Of course service quality management incorporates overall call quality itself, and managing common problems like dial tone failure and call setup problems. These issues are often not caused by the VoIP application itself, but by problems in other operational domains. Specialized VoIP ecosystem management can help you identify, diagnose and solve quality of service issues from a telephony perspective within the overall data network.
For more visit www.prognosis.com/voip-monitoring
