Voice readiness NW assessment - the painless option
Scratching your head trying to make progress?
ACT 1
Perhaps you'd like, at least initially, to get a feel for how well it might go without disrupting any users or drawing attention to yourself. Silently sneak in with covert action, easily deniable if the outcome is bad. Perhaps you're beyond that stage and faced with piles of unopened boxes of handsets ordered to get that great year-end deal.
Maybe you've worked out how make it all work - if only all those other apps weren't already hogging the network. What happens to their performance when you suck out the bandwidth voice needs. That's when someone lands the knockout punch and whispers "We have QoS from our provider - we do, don't we?" with the same reverence normally reserved for Penicillin or 3D contact lenses that let you see the world in err, 3D.
This of course, is meant to re-assure you - it doesn't. You know that QoS is being paid for, but no one knows if its actually doing anything. You also know that it isn't QoS, it's just CoS. The two have a sort of Gandalf/Gollum comparison. Has anyone ever tested it? Certainly not you. The comment just sets you up for a fall. You think of the Brian Setzer song "If you keep on sinnin', I'll stick another pin in. You're my hoodoo voodoo doll." Darn why did they have to mention QoS, now everyone thinks it'll just - you know - work.
Fade to Curtain...
ACT2
I'ts gonna be OK though, Gandalf-proportioned help is at hand.
Let's schedule that covert action. You drop a PathView microAppliance quietly into the network. no-one will know because its so small. If you squashed a tennis ball into a rectangular block, that's how big it would be. Installation is a breeze and it takes 1 minute to set up your path to that first branch office. Instantly, the Path is up and running and things look good. You realize you haven't been breathing for a few minutes like at school when you're waiting outside the Head's office.
"That wasn't so bad" you think, particularly as you're breathing again. No one's noticed because PathView has such a tiny footprint on the network - just a few packets a minute. OK now you want to go the whole hog. Using AppView Voice you run, first one call then 3, then 5 concurrent calls for just 5 minutes. Again its looking good. MOS score never worse than 4.2 with other vital signs like Latency, Jitter & Packet Loss all looking stable. Guess what shows you that?
You've been keeping an eye on the other applications and they seem OK too. Home straight now. First out of hours, that went well, then during rush hour morning, you run 10 concurrent calls for 1 hour. Tired of punching air, relieved and content, you amble back down Rocky's steps. "Why did I ever worry?" you think.
What you didn't tell anyone was that there was a sticky moment! Voice quality had hit a problem during the 10 concurrent call session out of hours. What was that faint recollection? Ah yes, Class of Service. Even Gollum came up with the goods. AppView enabled you to tag its Voice traffic with the ancient and mysterious EF symbol and you finally start using that providers service you's been paying for since 2009.
ACT 3
Voice deployment works fine with problems diagnosed and fixed in minutes as they occur by Gandalf himself - Well OK, by using the PathView Cloud suite. Actually that's better, because Gandalf has a habit of making himself scarce just when you need him.
Take well deserved bow...
