Quality communications are essential if you want to ensure streamlined connections between your business and the clients you support. For some business leaders, that means implementing Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). But is VoIP truly all you need to ensure quality of every interaction, and is VoIP really that good?
In reality, VoIP has had a somewhat questionable reputation since its inception simply because quality interactions weren’t already assured. In fact, concerns about quality often kept adoption at bay and slowed the rate at which companies embraced VoIP. While many of the issues causing problems have been eliminated, companies are now taking VoIP one step further with Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS).
While many are excited about what this kind of move means, the reality is that embracing UCaaS can make monitoring and troubleshooting VoIP a little more complicated. When all communications are being sent over networks not owned, maintained, or managed by the business, it’s difficult for IT to ensure application performance.
In the past, the IT team could rely on granular inspection of the VoIP packets, protocol analysis, and packet capture to ensure the VoIP connection was on point. When embracing a UCaaS environment, however, such techniques provide limited visibility into the actual situation as they are simply reactive in nature. Network visibility and application monitoring in the UCaaS environment must be a priority. Fortunately, there are best practices you can put to use.
Benchmark
It’s difficult to achieve the quality levels you want if you don’t have a clear picture of where you are regarding performance. With a proactive approach, you can simulate VoIP calls to replicate real-time flows. This enables you to continue to build a baseline for active monitoring. Plus, you can more easily benchmark and evaluate your UCaaS solution before you go live, ensuring better outcomes.
Monitoring
It’s not uncommon to see recommendations surrounding the importance of monitoring without a clear understanding of what should be monitored. In this case, put tools in place to monitor RTP voice quality and SIP transactions, in addition to monitoring for MOS. Since the SIP server network path is independent of the RTP stream, you’ll gain insight into the network topology needed to provide the contextual data necessary for troubleshooting.
The Network
While it should seem obvious, the network and its consistent operation is essential to optimal performance. Communication applications can be sensitive to network inconsistencies. This is also likely an area your IT team already manages well; just make sure it’s a priority.
If you’re ready to embrace the opportunities afforded by UCaaS, contact Truth Comm. Our experience in this area ensures that we can not only put a solution in place that meets your needs, but we’ll also help you best determine the right monitoring to achieve optimal success.
