Gallery

Playing poker with VoIP

Posted on 10 Aug 2009 at 19:59

Steve Cassidy wins a game of buzzword poker with a VoIP expert

I’m considering taking up online poker, not because I’m a dab hand with risk or feats of memory, but because I’m slowly developing a sense for when people have been completely sideswiped by my casual comments.

I recently sat down for lunch with a VoIP telephony implementation guru. Normally, we high-flyers get invited for a cheese roll with the systems architect, or at worst the VP of marketing, and very rarely do we meet the coal-face guys who actually crawl under the desks or frown over the config pages.

Besides which, VoIP is becoming ever more invasive into the world of smaller business networks, and there’s a good deal of territorial carving up going on between the old world of telephone sales, service and support, and the networking people.

Did you know that most smallish companies spend more on their phone system than they do on their network? One quote I saw recently to overhaul a 200-seat organisation’s internal phones was more than three times its spend on the network last year, which itself was subject to a major overhaul. That kind of financial disparity between the different technologies that operate over the same infrastructure is bound to create tension, so my lunch had slight overtones of two gunslingers feeling their way in a saloon-bar conversation as a prelude to the shoot-out on Main Street later.

most networks I see are woefully untuned even for the simple stuff, never mind for such exotica

What I wanted to know from the VoIP guy was this: did he find that most phone systems co-operated well with most LANs, or was it better to run VoIP on its own separate network?

What he wanted to know from me was this: how widespread are the types of technology that make VoIP operate cleanly? How often did I come across hot buzzword technologies such as link-teaming, jumbo packets and multicast? He developed that telltale “sideswiped” look when I told him that most networks I see are woefully untuned even for the simple stuff, never mind for such exotica.

The majority of people, I said, believe that the default Microsoft NIC driver does what it says on the tin, so there’s no need to go any further, but the truth is that it’s barely enough to get you going in a basic way, talking to a pretty narrow selection of counterparty devices (switches and server NICs), and that NIC vendor-specific drivers are the only way to go. The best way to find out whether you have an untuned network is to copy a large file, and if the Windows copy progress bar staggers – showing alternate fast and slow periods when there are relatively few other users on the network – then you’re in need of a driver tidy-up.

“Oh hell,” said the VoIP guy, “I see that all the time.” I’m forced to wonder just how well these VoIP rollouts actually go, if the underlying network on to which VoIP traffic and devices are being layered is already broken. I expect there’s an element of a free ride, because VoIP commonly requires Power over Ethernet (PoE) switches and Quality of Service (QoS) support too, and neither of those can be added to old and quirky switches. So quite a lot of sins are covered up because a smarter bit of kit landed in the middle of the network, under the auspices of the new telephone project – but many others aren’t.

Download a year of Steve Cassidy's Networks columns by heading to our Free Downloads site