VXSuite Takes the Scary Out of VoIP

By: John Shepler

You know that Unified Communications based on VoIP telephony is the future of business communications. You also know that it is likely a good UC solution can improve the productivity of your business. You’ve been hesitating, though, because ripping everything out and moving to the new technology is downright scary. The phones work fine on their old twisted pair wiring. Well, if by fine you mean you can make and receive calls on your desk phones. That’s pretty much the end of the road for analog and TDM technology. If you want more, you’ll have to make the leap to IP networking all the way around.

Not So Fast...
Oh, but you’ve heard horror stories about companies merging their phones onto the computer network. All of sudden, voices get distorted, calls get dropped. Who wants that? Perhaps it’s better just to stay old school and let somebody else take on the new technology.

Can You Afford Not To?
OK, but you are also letting them take the profits that come with the increased efficiency of having your business apps, desk phones, smartphones, video conferencing, and call center all on one integrated system. Wait long enough and your competitors responsiveness will improve so much that they’ll run circles around your company and start siphoning off customers, then employees.

Looking Under the Hood
What if there were tools that could take the guesswork out of implementing VoIP and UC on your network? Most of the issues you’ll encounter arise from the fact that a network set up for computers can work just fine for file transfers but be a disaster when it comes to handling real-time apps like voice and video. You need to protect those interactive streams from getting crushed by mountains of data moving around. To do that you need to look inside the network and see what is happening.


VXSuite is a toolset ideally qualified to analyze your currenct legacy network and report if you have bandwidth, latency, jitter or congestion issues that will make a mess out of VoIP. You’ll need to implement class of service on your network so that each type of packet stream has the priority and other characteristics it needs to perform optimally.

Before the Move
First, use VXSuite to analyze your system before your make any changes. VXSuite will report on your current voice call volume and usage. It uses that data to calculated min, max and average bandwidth requirements that will support VoIP when you switch. Find and fix problems here and you’ll have a much smoother transition.

A Quality of Experience Assessment is an automated test that deploys software agents on your network to create VoIP test calls to see what bottlenecks arise. Each test call is analyzed for delay, jitter & packet loss and then assigned an MOS score that indicates the quality of the voice communications.

After the Move
Once you deploy your new VoIP and/or UC system, you are not left in the dark. VXSuite monitors call quality and network issues during the rollout phase that can include both VoIP and legacy PBX systems simultaneously. You’ll get reports on how things are working and alarms if there is trouble.

Continuing Support
As ongoing support, the VXSuite cloud-based analytics toolkit continues to monitor your network environment to ensure that voice quality is maintained and issues diagnosed and resolved. You can set threshold levels for delay, jitter, packet loss, MOS, CPU utilization, memory utilization and so on to enable your IT staff to know instantly when problems develop. No more worrying that trouble is sneaking up behind you.

The Toolset You Really Need
Have you been putting off making the technology changes you should because you are worried that things will get worse, not better, when you make the move to VoIP and Unified Communications? If so, now’s the time to get more information about how VXSuite tools and cloud based communications
can improve your productivity and likely reduce cost at the same time.

The Age Of Managed Networks Is Upon Us

It’s a sign of changing times. Competitive carrier AireSpring is now providing proactive networking monitoring free of charge to customers of its MPLS and Voice over MPLS solutions. That’s 24 hour continuous SNMP monitoring of the network that will generate alarms and reports if any deviation occurs. You can be sound asleep, but the NOC (Network Operations Center) will be keeping an eye on your MPLS network.

What heralds the future in this announcement is that service provider management of WAN services is on its way to become the default standard. That’s a far cry from the last half-century of bandwidth services. You ordered your dedicated lines, set up your networks and supplied your own staff to monitor operation. If something went haywire when the lights were off overnight, it got discovered and dealt with in the morning. A multi-national or otherwise 24/7 operation provided its own NOC to keep track of LANs and WANs worldwide.

Perhaps it has been the constant hammering on cost reductions caused by the deep recession that were are just now coming out of. Company budgets have been beaten down and beaten down to the point where business as usual a decade ago is just plain unaffordable anymore. Out of desperation, companies have sought out new methods of getting business done that don’t involve so many people and so much investment.

Into this opportunity gap have stepped the managed IT service offerings. That’s everything from outsourcing your entire IT department to partnering with suppliers to take over responsibility for maintaining the integrity of the line service you lease, to closing data centers and shipping the equipment to a colo center or selling it off in favor of doing everything in the cloud.

The common theme is lease versus ownership. Ownership certainly has its advantages. It also has its responsibilities. Medium and larger companies liked the idea of having everything under their tight control in-house. After all, who’s going to look after your interests like you do yourself? It’s easier to control security and network configurations when your people are running the show. If you have to go outside to get a connection, like you do with telecom services, you simply have the carrier nail up a line between point A and point B. If and when it fails, your terminal equipment will set off the alarms and you get on the phone to file a trouble report and then monitor the progress of the repairs.

What downsizing pressures and lack of available capital have done is slowly pry the tight grip of total control away from corporate staff in favor of letting outside suppliers provide some services and take responsibility for their performance. What many companies are discovering, to their surprise, is that providers can be trusted to deliver and maintain everything from networks to computing resources and business telephone switching.

Managed WAN services can be anything from a point to point T1 line to a complex international MPLS network with hundreds or thousands of connections. The demarcation point becomes the managed router rather than the smart jack. By installing Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), service providers have a view of everything on the WAN between your LAN edges. That includes all last mile connections as well as what’s going on with the core network.

That CPE is destined to move farther and farther into the local network as customers come to trust their IT service providers. Once they realize that the carrier or cloud provider is catching and fixing problems faster than they had been doing themselves, the reluctance to lease rather than own resources will fade away. The desire to return to an era of high capital investments, higher staffing levels and slow response to sudden demand changes will disappear. The flexibility of the company to adapt to change will correspondingly increase and older paradigms will seem as quaint as stacks of punched cards and racks of glowing vacuum tubes.

Are you being squeezed for investment capital and personnel, yet dependent on high performance information technology and telecommunications to be competitive? If so, perhaps now is the perfect time to consider managed IT and network services. Compare the costs and flexibility and see if managed solutions can be of service to your company.

From T1 to Ethernet

Your LAN is running smoothly, but now you need to connect to the outside world for dedicated Internet service, point to point data transfer, or VoIP call termination. A T1 line seems like a cost effective solution, but your network protocol is Ethernet, not T1 data. How do you make the conversion?

Relax. Pick the right T1 line carrier and they'll take care of it for you. Yes, there was a time when you had to deal with Channel Service Units, Data Service Units, router setups and interfacing everything together. The new way is to let the service provider handle all these issues with a managed router.

A T1 router is a level 3 device specifically designed to work with T1 lines. The T1 standard is very specific with regards to line coding, framing, signal levels, impedances and synchronization. Ethernet is equally specific with regard to packet organization. The CSU / DSU portion of the T1 router accepts the T1 line signal from the Smart Jack at the demarcation point and performs all the necessary functions to transmit and receive data. The Ethernet interface gives you an RJ45 jack that connects to your LAN. The magic in-between makes sure that packets and frames get properly matched.

Another advantage of managed routers is that they allow the T1 service provider to monitor the complete WAN or Wide Area Network from their facilities through your router. That makes maintenance and troubleshooting easier and faster. It's likely your carrier will also set up automatic monitoring of your link so they can swing into action if something goes wrong even after business hours.

The latest option in WAN options is end to end Ethernet. The entire circuit between facilities runs IP protocol, not TDM the protocol of T1 lines. Your connection can be a level 3 router or level 2 switch, depending on how the network is setup. In practice, your field offices and main offices can be on the same LAN even though they are hundreds or thousands of miles apart rather than a few feet.

This service is also called Carrier Ethernet. It is provisioned directly onto an IP-based fiber optic carrier, so there are no awkward protocol conversions involved. It's also the most cost-effective WAN bandwidth you can get, especially for 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet connections. You'll need to be in or near a building that is lit for fiber optic Carrier Ethernet. Such a facility might be closer than you think. Check to see if your building is lit for Ethernet.

Not very near an Ethernet carrier point of presence? One common solution is to relocate your servers to a colocation facility, where lower cost bandwidth is readily available. Another is to use T1 lines, alone or in multiples, to create the bandwidth connections you need. Call the toll free number or enter a quick online search now to see what service is available for your location.