VoIP Downtime - How to Avoid It

The benefits and cost savings associated with VoIP come at a price. It's not much of a price to pay if you know what you're doing but without it, your VoIP experiment would go down in flames. And that price is vigilance. By choosing to combine your phone lines with the Internet lines, you're mixing two very different types of traffic. Regular Internet traffic can be delayed, slowed down, and even arrive out of sync with what was sent. Text or images can arrive in any order and users don't care. Webpage components aren't read 100% sequentially.

VoIP data on the other hand is very sensitive to disturbances in its time line. The packets have to arrive and be assembled in the exact same way in which they were sent. Moreover, they can't be delayed even by a few milliseconds as the end users then begin to notice. For this, they need a clear path through your network and this is what administrators must strive to provide. No matter how heavy Internet usage is, a dedicated line must always be provided for VoIP data.

We've seen before that the way to do this is by implementing Virtual LANs or VLANs where VoIP has its own bandwidth which cannot be encroached upon. Moreover, routers must be programmed to prioritize VoIP data so that end users have nothing to complain about. Proactive measures in this area will prevent VoIP downtime.

However, you can be even more vigilant by routinely taking measurements of key VoIP metrics. Just like your regular Internet data isn't static and changes over time, the same is true for VoIP as well. More employees, longer hours, more conference calls, and new applications which make use of the latest advances, video chat etc. can all work to eat up your VoIP bandwidth - and suddenly what you had before isn't good enough anymore.

By keeping a keen eye on parameters such as jitter and packet loss, network administrators can get early warning signals of when a VoIP network needs attention. You can even program your application to warn you when these variables cross a certain limit. Automating the process helps a great deal. Admins can then take action such as widening the bandwidth allocation or initiate steps to increase the total amount of bandwidth available by changing the Internet plan for the company.

By staying ahead of the game and carefully monitoring the performance of VoIP, you can ensure that your VoIP experiment runs smoothly and is a success.