September 14, 2005
Predeployment testing for better VoIP implementation
Two factors that can affect the time required for deploying VoIP and the extent of its usefulness include preassessment and periodic in-house assessment and monitoring. Preassessments are carried out with the objective of ironing out the faults, such as poor cabling, bandwidth congestion, etc, that may not affect data transfer but can be detrimental to real-time communication.
Usually, corporates employ consultants for carrying out objective preassessments; however, in-house administrators must team up with the third-party integrators to develop their own skill sets. ClearSight Analyzer is a voice monitoring tool that tests the quality of the actual voice traffic. AppareNet Voice is a tool that provides end-to-end assessment by generating simulated traffic. This allows the system administrators to find out the trouble zones in the network before starting to implement VoIP. The network is assessed for jitter, delay, and packet loss and graded by using a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) or an R-Value score.
AppareNet Voice uses Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) that queries the IP addresses on the network and by routing some sample traffic to the remote hosts, it is able to give an assessment of the network performance. Vivinet Assessor simulates the call load over the distributed endpoints and provides a performance report.
The MOS value ranges from 1 to 5, with 1 being not fit for use and 5 being excellent. It is a subjective score and is based on user perception. The R-Value is an objective score and is based on the G.107 specification. It has a scale of 1 to 100 that measures loudness, signal clarity, and signal disturbances.
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