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Telecommunications: Can Cisco Answer the Call?
9/29/2004
Other universities aren’t as fortunate. At Australia’s Ballarat, a local Nortel channel partner “didn’t have any field experience” installing and configuring Nortel’s VoIP solution, which “caused a few delays before we could go into full production,” recalls Ballarat’s Dowsley. Nortel’s Shepherd points out that more and more VoIP integrators are entering the market, but concedes that early voice-over-Internet deployments—up until 2002 or so—suffered from a lack of trained consultants on the street. Even so, Ballarat’s Nortel VoIP system took only a few days to install, and provided immediate benefits. “Universities tend to be fluid in their organizational structures,” notes Dowsley. “With VoIP, staff can now pick up their phones, walk to a new office, and plug them in. You don’t have to program these changes into a PBX. With phone lines treated as data lines, we can add services easily as demand rises and falls.”
Four Steps to Success
Not sure where to start with VoIP? According to a spokesperson for NEC Unified Solutions Inc. (www.necunifiedsolutions.com), a major integration firm with voice-over-Internet expertise, savvy university telecommunications administrators should take the following four steps before deploying a VoIP system:
1—Size up traffic. Determine existing traffic
levels across the data and voice networks. This will help to develop QoS (quality
of service) requirements and bandwidth needs for a converged VoIP network.
2—Fix outstanding problems. Detect and resolve
existing network issues, such as bottlenecks in certain LAN segments.
3—Set network topology. Develop an accurate
network topology picture to uncover potential routing and switching issues.
4—Baseline IP performance. Establish a baseline
measurement of the IP network’s current performance in order to measure
future performance.
Experts maintain that skipping the four steps above can lead to massive setbacks because VoIP performance is difficult to predict.
“On an enterprise level, network infrastructure plays a huge role in the efficacy of a VoIP rollout,” says Brian Maroldo, technical director at NYIT. “Audio and video, unlike typical network applications, are extremely sensitive to loss and delay. From core to edge, the network needs to be set up properly to implement voice-over-Internet.”
Recent history proves Maroldo’s point. Many early VoIP networks suffered from unplanned downtime, and didn’t achieve “five nines” (99.999%) availability, concedes Viswas Purani, director of Emerging Technologies and Applications at APC. (In layman’s terms, “five nines” availability is less than 5.26 minutes of unplanned downtime per year.) Yet many early VoIP systems delivered only “three nines” (99.9%) availability—or about nine hours of unplanned downtime per year. If that d'esn’t sound so bad to you, consider losing your phones for nine hours during peak enrollment periods, major fundraising campaigns or campus emergencies. Fortunately, recent upgrades to VoIP hardware and software have largely resolved such reliability concerns and it’s now possible to deploy VoIP systems that achieve “five nines” reliability, asserts Purani.
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