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Enterprises are rapidly adopting IP telephony for cost savings, productivity gains and business innovation, but delivering a high quality voice service takes more than just buying the latest IP telephony equipment.
Successfully deploying IP telephony to your enterprise also means understanding the requirements for delivering toll-quality voice over your company's network infrastructure, and then appropriately planning for, choosing and deploying the right IP telephony solution. Making sure the network is ready for IP telephony is a critical success factor.
ShoreTel, the innovation leader in enterprise IP telephony, has set new standards for usability and manageability while reducing telecom costs. To ensure an optimal IP telephony experience, ShoreTel requires customers to have a thorough assessment of their networks. ShoreTel's solutions providers can assist with this assessment.
Here are the straight facts about planning for and deploying IP telephony in your enterprise.
IP Telephony's Business Benefits
Cost reduction, improved productivity, increased innovation and better collaboration are the measurable business benefits of IP telephony.
IP telephony offers significant cost savings by providing an alternative to high cost toll services. Organizations can reduce recurring voice toll charges and slash the high cost of supporting remote offices. IP telephony also enables enterprises to simplify their data and voice networks into a single converged infrastructure, thus improving operational efficiency.
Savings from IP telephony can be substantial. Savings can range from $9,600 to $28,000 per site annually for large organizations and between $4,800 and $9,600 for mid-sized organizations, according to Nemertes Research's study "Convergence: Reality at Last," published in 2004.
IP telephony increases organizations' ability to innovate. It increases worker productivity and efficiency by integrating call handling with Microsoft Outlook for efficient call management. IP telephony also enables collaborative and productivity operations such as unified communications, distributed contact centers, multimedia training and spreadsheet and data file sharing. Business, within and across the company, gets done more efficiently.
Architectural Requirements
IP telephony creates an opportunity for IT organizations to deliver superior service than with legacy PBXs, but delivering an enterprise-quality service means IT managers must pay close attention to IP telephony's architectural requirements.
- Reliability and scalability: Because of a distributed architecture, IP PBXs can deliver a more reliable, scalable voice service. For example, ShoreTel's systems are extremely reliable with no single point of failure. Organizations can easily scale their phone system as their needs grow. Expansion is flexible and seamless.
Users hear jitter as degraded voice quality. Jitter is variation in latency over the LAN and WAN, as the IP telephony packets arrive in uneven patterns at their destination. Jitter has many sources: network congestion, queuing methods used in routers and switches, or routing options such as MPLS or frame relay used by carriers.
To compensate for jitter, ShoreTel's ShoreGear voice switches continually measure the jitter in the system and dynamically change the size of jitter receive buffers in 5 ms increments to optimize voice quality.
Packet loss requirements: Packet loss results in a metallic sound or dropouts in the conversation. Packet loss is caused by congestion, poor line quality and geographical distance. Since IP telephony is a real-time audio service that uses the Real Time Protocol (RTP) running over User Datagram Protocol (UDP), there's no way to recover lost packets. If even one or two percent of IP telephony packets drop, voice quality degrades.
ShoreGear's lost packet concealment capability reduces the impact of packet loss. When there's no voice sample to be played, the last sample is replayed to a receiving party at a reduced level. This is repeated until a nominal level is reached, effectively reducing the clicking and popping associated with low levels of packet loss.
What applications, such as video, voice, Web-based applications, enterprise applications, e-mail, backups and Web browsing, are used?and how much bandwidth does each consume? Gaining a good understanding of the application load on the network will help you prepare to meet the real-time demands of IP telephony.
Plan for growth. When designing the LAN/WAN infrastructure for IP telephony, consider your organization's needs in two years. Today's requirement may be for ten calls per minute, but in a year, it could grow to 30 calls per minute.
Assess your local network. Know what equipment exists in your network, and have an accurate architectural diagram. Make sure your network equipment is current, and use virtual LANs (VLANs) for voice traffic.
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