Companies should be implementing network analyzers before rolling out VoIP or any unified communications application to understand their current network performance, identify and eliminate potential obstacles, determine performance benchmarks, and to monitor performance post deployment.

Beyond avoiding upfront obstacles to success, the insights gained from pre-deployment testing and continual monitoring of the added VoIP traffic will help you to intelligently configure alarms on the monitoring tool to alert you when VoIP performance deviates from the norm.

Charles Thompson
http://www.networkinstruments.com

Consumer VoIP can cut corners, and deliver a “cheap” solution that works most of the time.

Business VoIP cannot afford to cut corners, because a) we have SLAs b) we pay our people well to support our service and c) downtime hurts the $$$ bottom line of our customers.

Those are a few of the reasons that we’ve made it a priority to include edge devices on our business VoIP deployments if at all possible. It’s not a magic fix-it-all, by any means, but our analysis indicated that the devices help enough to justify the additional cost.

The points are actually Luke’s (no need to reinvent the wheel). But I agree with them.

To address your question, I don’t think that the benefits of edge devices or network monitoring are very well known or fully understood by small to medium sized businesses.

Hate it or love it, many customers are arriving at our door and those of service providers everywhere with the “VoIP is cheap” mentality still. This causes many to simply try and deliver the low cost solution, rather than the proper solution (and taking the right steps along the way).

In order to reverse this the industry as a whole will need to continue to educate the general public as to the benefits of edge devices, network monitoring, proper infrastructure and bandwidth.

It’s a big effort, but the upside of more well informed customers is a huge win for all.

I guess I used the term “prevent” loosely.

An edge device won’t prevent the user from downloading torrents (the first time), but it can prevent it from happening in the future (through the insight the edge device gives customers/service providers).

I would like to see that device prevent problem when users are download torrents or massive UDP streaming.