VoIP

Deploying and Maintaining VoIP

The Real World

A large brick-and-mortar retailer depended on wireless VoIP on their sales floors to enable sales associates to handle both floor traffic and telephone inquiries. After performing extensive, and expensive, site surveys at their facilities, they believed that access points had been optimally placed and secured using non-overlapping channels, highly-secure encryption and dedicated switches for the APs. Initial call quality was on par with Ethernet-attached VoIP phones in the store offices, but before long, call quality began to degrade, to the point of dropped calls and increasing customer dissatisfaction.

The Real Solution

Using OmniPeek Enterprise Enhanced Voice Edition as the console to monitor the expert data, the customer was able to quickly identify a key weakness in their deployment – Quality of Service (QoS) had not been implemented at the 802.11 layer, meaning that voice packets were competing with data packets for network priority. Voice packets are far more sensitive to time delays than are data packets, and should be receiving the highest quality of service from APs, routers and switches. The customer corrected this deficiency, and rolled out OmniPeek Enhanced Voice Edition at all of their stores to monitor and analyze the wireless network in real-time, and identify and correct problems before they became critical.

The Real Benefits

Mobility creates a constantly changing environment that must be constantly monitored. Monitoring alone, however, is not enough. Constant monitoring generates volumes of data. Only a system that can perform expert analysis, both real-time and post capture, is capable of effectively delivering the critical data, events and troubleshooting capabilities to those responsible for network monitoring. VoIP creates additional, unique challenges in the wireless environment. Having a single tool that spans the range of packet collection to call playback provides network engineers with a single, cost-effective solution to manage wireless data and services.