Leverage VoIP hype for network improvements

October 12, 2004 —

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) has gotten more ink this year than the presidential campaign. Your company either has VoIP or will have VoIP. What the VoIP people forget is plumbing, the kind of Ethernet plumbing VoIP brochures ignore.

Just as there is no free lunch, there are no free packets. Sure, your network runs fine, your switches switch and your fiber flies. Today. But if you tell me your network guarantees QoS (Quality of Service) to every desktop and every device, you're either confused or lying.

Take that last paragraph to your budget meetings, because those people must hear this information. VoIP proponents yell "cheaper cheaper cheaper" constantly, but they turn away when the more technical staff members yell "infrastructure infrastructure infrastructure." After all, new phones are fun, but network plumbing just confuses people (especially when we call it plumbing since there's no water involved).

Go to a department testing VoIP, or yelling how they need to test VoIP. Put traffic monitors on the network. Let them crank up their chatter quotient. Point to the traffic spikes. Resist the urge to dope slap them when they tell you to put another RJ-45 connector in their office.

The good news is that Gigabit Ethernet prices no longer scare budget clerks to death. Draft a budget extending your Gigabit Ethernet support beyond the server rooms out to the department wiring closets. That's the type of speed you're going to need if VoIP takes hold big time.

You can show metrics for this increase based on the bandwidth used by inter-office VoIP already. Anyone here rolled out VoIP between branches and seen traffic drop? Show that increasing traffic trend diagram to your management come budget time. Yes, this is another poker chip for that meeting.

The next step, of course, is to completely re-design your internal wireless network, if you have one. Companies with Wi-Fi running already will soon start testing Vo-Fi phones, running VoIP over your wireless network.

If you don't have Wi-Fi installed already, make sure you design your upcoming wireless network to support the coming flood of VoIP traffic as well. Don't believe your management if they say there are no plans for Vo-Fi, because it will come whether you're ready or not and whether they admit it or not.

James

ITworld.com, Enterprise Networking