Before implementing a VoIP system, you must be certain that the network has sufficient bandwidth to deliver high-quality voice calls without adversely affecting your existing data services. You need to know in advance how many voice calls your current network can safely support. Telephone Connection utilizes NetAlly Lifecycle Manager to answer these questions without the cost of pilot deployments or the risk and time demands of a “trial and error” approach.

NetAlly Lifecycle Manager allows you to quickly and easily perform a pre-deployment network assessment to determine if your network is ready for reliable VoIP and how many concurrent calls the network will allow. NetAlly`s built-in trouble-shooting facilities will then help you pinpoint where your network needs improvement before successfully deploying VoIP. As an operations-oriented system, NetAlly also serves a crucial role after the initial deployment. The system will continue to verify voice and data performance on an ongoing basis and diagnose network performance problems in real time.

NetAlly measures and analyzes three important parameters relating to VoIP performance on a network:

Delay. Because voice calls are real-time, full-duplex communications end-to-end delay of packets can have severe repercussions on usability of the VoIP solution. Delay of less than 150ms is considered acceptable, while delay of more than 400ms is considered to be unusable. NetAlly can provide very close estimations of the one-way delay between any two points on the network, or using optional hardware for communicating with GPS satellites, NetAlly can provide highly-accurate measurements.

Jitter. In IP networks, not all packets suffer the same amount of delay. Variations in packet delay, also known as jitter, cause VoIP packets to arrive at their destination in uneven patterns. This can result in degraded voice quality. Typically, the solution to jitter problems is to increase the size of the jitter buffer in VoIP components. However, this solution increases overall delay and must take into consideration network delay characteristics. NetAlly helps you determine ideal jitter buffer sizes for optimum voice quality.

Loss. An occasional lost voice packet will have negligible impact, because of the small size of VoIP data packets. However, as packet loss nears or exceeds one percent, voice quality is degraded. This is especially true if packet loss occurs in bursts. NetAlly can help you determine where there is congestion causing packet loss on your network, so you can address this potential problem.