22 February 2007

Take the latency, jitter and echo out of your VoIP quality of service

IP voice quality has improved dramatically in the past few years, but as VoIP gets closer and closer to toll-quality sound, it’s caught in something of a Catch-22. “The only way to ensure end-to-end quality, especially across mixed vendor or provider environments, is to over-engineer bandwidth," that is, dedicate a too-wide swath of the available network to VoIP, says Lisa Pierce, a vice president at Forrester Research. “But that defeats the purpose of moving to VoIP in the first place," to save money and, in some cases, simplify infrastructure.

That said, network managers have identified multiple steps to improve, if not guarantee, the quality and reliability of their VoIP services, whether in-house or outsourced.