The Project

Voice Over IP(VoIP) is a new technology that is quickly being adopted and improved by many telecommunications companies. VoIP allows a subscriber to use a typical internet connection to place telephone calls without having to use a traditional telephone system. According to a recent survey major companies are moving towards the deployment of VoIP. There is no doubt that this technology offers many advantages over traditional phone lines, starting with cost.

Nex-Tech

As is customary Nex-Tech Rural Telephone company is determined to bring these “large city luxuries” to small town folk. Nex-Tech currently uses VoIP in their offices but would like to provide it to their customers.

As a result of our assistance that we provided to Nex-Tech, Nex-Tech now requires that all new VoIP Customers have routers that QoS capability. This is one of the ways that our research benefited Nex-Tech’s VoIP service.

Purpose

As a group our concentration in this project was to generate traffic in order to stress or break our VoIP network that we setup in a professional manner. Working as a group knowledge was gained in various areas of understanding and managing the VoIP network. The question, then, is whether VoIP can produce the quality required for acceptable speech communications in a business environment. And in spite of the problems experienced in many applications to date, the answer is still a yes - it just takes some care in addressing the various elements that can contribute to poor performance. We challenged ourselves with the task to find the limit of these elements that would cause poor performance.

Project Summary

Users and manufacturers need to seek ways to minimize the impact of congestion on VoIP to the greatest extent possible. Remember that VoIP generally works well if everything is perfect - as if life were that easy! It is quite obvious that each company, or customer is going to require different services and capabilities. It is because of this, that it is really hard, nearing impossible to make one distinct recommendation on what a company should do in regards to VoIP. The plus side being that there are many options a consumer can take, and most likely there will be a close fit to the desired services and performance for which the consumer is searching.

There is a common misconception that adding more bandwidth will solve all of network congestion problems. This theory is clearly proven inaccurate with our testing. Our tests’ results show that adding bandwidth actually does improve the voice quality, but it still doesn’t improve enough to experience voice transmissions that are at an acceptable level. Basically, added bandwidth is a “band-aid fix” for a problem that requires much greater attention.

The major recommendation that we would like to suggest is that some type of QoS is implemented. If there is any substantial traffic across the network, the voice transmission is generally considerably jeopardized. It is absolutely crucial for the smaller voice packets to have somewhat of priority over the larger transmissions, such as FTP, TFP, etc.

It is important to keep the service and performance in which you require in mind. If you are going to predominantly use the network for web and email, it is very acceptable to use a lower broadband connection. If you are going to be sending many large file transfers, and other bandwidth intensive applications, it will be very important that you have a link speed that will accommodate for those services.