December 2005 — Features

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VoIP to the Rescue

by Jacob Milner

“One of the reasons this has worked so well is because our internal staff has essentially taken responsibility for everything,” he says. “Not only has this saved us a ton of money, but the intangibles of our own people looking at this and saying, ‘We can do it, it’s ours’ pays all sorts of dividends.”

STRIKE UP THE BANDWIDTH
SOMETIMES EVEN A WELL-CONCEIVED VOIP IMPLEMENTATION FALLS FLAT ON ITS FACE— IF IT LACKS THE BACKBONE TO WORK PROPERLY.

KLAUS HILLMAN, director of Converged Solutions at Source Inc. (www.source.com), a technology integrator in Dallas, TX, explains that one of the biggest pitfalls for schools that want VoIP is a network which works for Web surfing but isn’t strong enough to support much more.

“For many schools, deploying VoIP isn’t as simple as deploying other network applications, for one major reason: bandwidth,” he says. “Without the proper routing and switching equipment, the quality of your calls will suffer dramatically.”

In the industry, this phenomenon is known as Quality of Service, or QoS. The QoS necessary for VoIP calls varies widely depending on the number of users on a network, but normally, any dedicated connection with bandwidth of at least 10MB per second supports the technology sufficiently. Shared connections with greater bandwidth will work well, too. According to Hillman, weaker connections will still support VoIP—but badly. He likens this phenomenon to talking with someone on a cell phone when you’re in an area with spotty coverage: The voice wavers, the connection is choppy, and the end result is a lot of gibberish.

“Generally, we try to make it pretty clear to our customers that there’s no point to investing in VoIP unless you can meet the minimum bandwidth requirements for high-quality calls,” says Hillman. “The very last thing you want to do is spend tens of thousands of dollars on this technology, then find out you can’t use it the way it’s supposed to be used.”

The best way to see what kind of bandwidth your network supports is to perform a network assessment. School districts that employ knowledgeable IT staffers can do this on their own; for others, organizations such as Hillman’s, as well as other solution providers and technology integrators, perform assessments for a small fee.