In a recently released report by the Webtorials Editorial/Analyst Division, there was both bad news and good news for enterprises implementing IP telephony over their WANs. The bad news is that the most important features are also the ones with which users are most dissatisfied. The good news is that tools are available to help address these needs.

The report, “IPT Monitoring and Management Total Customer Experience”, uses Webtorials’ methodology of plotting the importance of various features vs. the satisfaction with those features. This gives a graphical representation of whether the most important needs are being met. And, in one of the most striking findings since we started using our Total Customer Experience (TCE) methodology, there was high dissatisfaction with everything that was important, but less dissatisfaction in unimportant areas.

In particular, the key findings, as summarized in the report, are:
- Users consider voice quality over the network, voice-related network parameters, and bandwidth utilization as the three most important aspects of IPT to monitor.
- Users consider troubleshooting and diagnostics, monitoring voice quality, and the overall network as the three most important IPT management tasks.
- Users tend to be most dissatisfied with their IPT monitoring and management capabilities for the tasks they consider most important.
- Third-party IPT management tools exist to provide additional capabilities, and significantly higher levels of satisfaction can be achieved by implementation of these tools.

To a great extent, this dissatisfaction can be considered an outgrowth of the fundamental differences in the monitoring and management characteristics of traditional voice vs. packetized voice. Also, many of the network performance metrics have quite different levels of importance for voice than for traditional data.

The promised good news, though, is that there is help available. Third-party ITP management products are available that support systems from most of the major IPT suppliers. In addition to filling in the gaps left by the IPT systems themselves, many of these systems also support management of equipment from multiple suppliers, an issue that will be increasingly important as enterprises must support a multivendor environment.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.