VoIP requires robust infrastructure that has to be operational 24×7. If your email goes down for 10 minutes it’s not as critical, but if your voice services go down for 10 minutes, it’s a huge deal!

Keeping in mind how critical voice communications is, it is essential to plan the network accordingly. Don’t go cheap on the essential infrastructure components like network switches, routers and even cabling. Most companies tend to use the cheapest contractor for cabling when it can be one of the most critical components of the network that can haunt you for years to come. Make sure who-ever installs your cabling tests and certifies it for the amount of data that will be pushed through it.

Use intelligent switches that support multiple VLANs and QoS. This will come in handy to segregate different types of traffic, like data and voice traffic and prioritize voice traffic. VLANs allow you to have one physical network but logically have it split into multiple, so your voice can travel on VLAN1 while your data travels on VLAN2. You can have other services like video travel on VLAN3.

This not only provides your users a better experience for different voice, data and video services but also will assist in quicker troubleshooting of network issues as they arise and allow for testing of new services before deployment.

Remember, your entire infrastructure has to perform together. You can’t have one switch supporting VLANs while others don’t and you can’t have switches supporting VLANs while your routers don’t. Make the investment in the beginning and enjoy a successful roll-out instead of having to patch things on a routine basis later on.

If you don’t have in-house expertise for some of these technologies, it makes sense to go to a third party. If your planning is right from the beginning, it will be easier to scale your network and provide the quality of service your users expect.

Remember, you’ll have to provide POE (Power over Ethernet) for your VoIP nodes (handsets). You should have power backup on the POE circuit so your phones will stay operational even if there’s a power failure, users will expect this.

Recently, I talked about how some ISPs tend to block SIP traffic. If you have a branch office that does block SIP traffic, then you have the logical option to change the SIP port on your devices. This however, is not always feasible. Next best thing would be, if you have a VPN between the branch office and main office, to create static routes in your routers to route all SIP traffic over the VPN tunnel.

You’ll notice ISPs blocking SIP calls usually do this by blocking SIP port 5060 so if you change the port on your phone system to something else, and configure your end nodes to use the new port, they will work. This traffic will be visible to your ISP though, so the better option will be instead of changing ports to just route SIP traffic over you VPN.

Always check your local laws as I am no lawyer so any ideas you try, you are doing at your own risk.

I can’t believe ISPs are actually thinking they can hold the flood back by simply blocking SIP port, such ISPs are truly grasping at straws to keep their ancient model in the market.

Up until recently, there was no issue about net neutrality. Internet “pipes” did not distinguish between what type of traffic was passing through them and did not care to prioritize any type of traffic over other types.

This is changing fast. Comcast was caught blocking peer to peer sharing traffic on its network, if you recall this is the company claiming it gives you a bigger pipe compared to the phone companies, then why does it need to block traffic? Now that I have your attention, here is a list of ISP’s that block peer to peer type of traffic.

The bottom line is, if left to their own devices, traditional players may start to prioritize traffic to their content and give lower priority to competitors. For example, if an internet connectivity company started a search service, it might prioritize people using its own search service compared to Google. So now you know what side Google on.

“Given that the carriers are investing to provide the bandwidth to the home, I don’t see why they should not be compensated for third party services seeking higher quality of service. The critical issue is that the access fees need to be fair and reasonable. However, with competition from both cable and carriers and wireless, this access should be competitive.” stated Ken Cavanaugh, Director of Business Development at General Bandwidth.Someone needs to decide, when the public signs up for internet service, is it signing up for specific type of service or plain internet (all internet) access? If an ISP can block peer to peer traffic, can it block traffic to specific news channels, other ISPs, you see where this is going.The reason this should concern anyone using VoIP is that if the carrier starts to give your traffic low priority because you’re using a competitor’s lower cost voice service, then you are up a creek without a paddle, especially if your voice service provider is not in the business of providing internet access.

Since I’m based in the US, I tend to focus more on the US market place. The net neutrality issue is, however, bigger in some other countries. For example, I know for a fact, some (not sure if all) DSL providers in Pakistan block SIP traffic. This is imposed by the phone company providing internet connectivity so that users don’t start using lower cost VoIP services to make long distance calls, talk about pillaging the competition! Now if a provider started providing DSL service in Pakistan with no restrictions on SIP traffic, I know the public will be flocking to this provider, currently no one can do this as the “pipes” are controlled by one company and their terms are to block SIP traffic.

We know Cisco is well entrenched in the enterprise, and now it is going full steam towards SMB space.

It will be interesting to see how the Fonality’s and Talkswitch’s of the world fair against Cisco who wants to compete and is showing that it’s ready by introducing very competitively priced products like the  Cisco Unified Communications 500 Series. We know if Cisco is ready to take over the SMB market, it has plenty of resources to do so and has the financial strength to stay the course as competitors are pushed out. Here are some recently released Cisco products for SMB market:

• Cisco Unified Communications 500 Series adds 32- and 48-user systems. The initial release of the Unified Communications 500 Series addressed the unified communications needs of small businesses with eight to16 users. These two new platforms allow small businesses to support up to 48 phones per location.
• Cisco SMARTnet Service for SBCS is Cisco’s award-winning technical support service program, offering multilevel service options and access to an extensive range of technical resources. Sold by a Cisco channel partner, customers get direct, anytime access to Cisco engineers for configuration assistance, problem diagnosis and recommendations through 24-hour telephone or Web-based support. The offering also includes software assurance with application and Operating System software updates and upgrades.
• Cisco Catalyst® Express Ethernet Switches provide flexibility of configuration to meet different networking requirements. The four new switches offer 24 10/100 access ports with Power over Ethernet (PoE); 4 10/100 access ports with PoE and 20 access ports10/100; 24 ports of Gigabit Ethernet; or 24 10/100 access ports.
• Cisco Mobility Express: Cisco has added ease-of-deployment features for the Cisco 521 Wireless Express Access Point and Cisco 526 Wireless Express Mobility Controller. They include an easy-to-set-up guest access portal; automatic policy configuration for voice, data and guest access; simplified security set-up with preset low-, medium-, and high-security options; and integration with Cisco Configuration Assistant.

Since Cisco has already proven itself in the enterprise market and SMBs definitely recognize the brand name, I believe it’s just a matter of time, and if Cisco stays the course, it will take over the VoIP phone system market in this space.

Here’s the news regarding SMB from Cisco.

It is tempting to assume that you can simply implement VoIP on your existing network, as most vendors claim, and everything will just work, this is not the case.

For VoIP to be successful you have to have a certain level of service in place. Unlike data packets, voice packets must make it to their destination, if a packet is lost, it cannot be resent without repercussions.

So before you start planning your VoIP roll-out, do some home work, you might have to upgrade your network switches to prioritize voice traffic, you may have to upgrade your routers or even network wiring.

Here is an interesting article from Network World about VoIP analysis tools that will help you along the way.

Remember, not all switches/routers are the same; There is a difference between a high dollar (HP Procurve, Cisco, etc.) switch and a low cost (Linksys, D-Link, Netgear, etc.) switch. I know both might say they support 10/100 MBPS, both might be managed but if you test both side by side in a lab, you will see the difference.

Always have some sort of network traffic sniffer/analyzer in your toolkit, sooner or later, you will need it. Ethereal is a good opensource network packet analyzer to have in your arsenal. Ethereal will let you see the traffic flowing back and forth on your network so you’re not running blind when problems arise with voice quality and end node connectivity.

Know what codec your VoIP devices are using, all codecs are not the same and voice quality along with bandwidth usage is heavily dependent on codec used.

I’ve been using voice over IP for a while and it works great, but what about video over IP?

Although relatively new, I’ve been using video over IP for over a year now. I’m basically using it for entertainment, streaming media over IP via an 802.11g connection to my entertainment system.

I’ve tried several streaming applications to achieve this, by far, the best is Tversity. I run this on a Windows XP box and I have couple of media boxes, DSM-320 and DSM-520 that display video on a big screen TV.

I’ve also heard from some people that a voice conversation does not work very well over WiFi, I say, if live video can work over WiFi then voice is no problem. If it’s not working on your network, look at some other trouble spots.