Voice over IP implementations may be growing, but management tools lag

By John Morency
Network World on Network/Systems Management, 02/10/99

Without question, 1998 was the year in which Voice over IP took center stage as the hottest protocol in the industry press. In addition, a number of service providers either announced plans or began rolling out initial VoIP services, including Qwest, Level 3, AT&T, Infonet and GTC Telecom, among others. In fact, it's fair to say that VoIP services received far more attention in the service provider rather than the enterprise network arena over the past year. The reason is that, due to competitive service pressures, VoIP has been a far more pressing implementation priority for service providers than is the case for most enterprise network managers.

Recent research conducted jointly by Renaissance Worldwide in conjunction with the Metzler Group shows that many enterprise network managers still perceive that VoIP is not yet a sufficiently mature technology that warrants serious implementation consideration within their shops. This perception is somewhat at odds with the experience of many large network vendors who consider VoIP to be quite mature given the fact that today they are shipping tens of thousands of VoIP ready products to users across the globe. In addition, there is strong reason to believe that many of these vendors will even more aggressively emphasize enterprise VoIP deployment in 1999.

Irrespective of where one stands on the technical maturity of Voice over IP technology, there is one fact that both sides can generally agree on - when it comes to the availability of effective management tools, VoIP currently leaves a lot to be desired. This is true for both enterprise as well as service provider users.

Yet what does it really mean to manage VoIP services? I suspect that many users would point out that the most significant VoIP management issue at the moment is one of performance management. More specifically, these users want to ensure that the level of network capacity that is required per VoIP user is well understood. Also, they want to make sure the right set of management tools are in place to both effectively allocate as well as monitor the availability of that capacity in order to ensure that the resulting network voice quality is as high as it can be.

The actual number of tools that support this level of network planning and operational performance management for VoIP today are few and far between. There are a few vendors such as Cisco, Ganymede and Packeteer that have extended their product offerings to support VoIP, but clearly more are needed.

The reason why this is necessary is shown in recent results from tests conducted at the MCI WorldCom Developer's Lab. In these tests, packet loss conditions of 10%, 20% and 50% were applied to G.711 and G.723.1 VoIP packet payloads. In the former case, an effective payload capacity of 64K bit/sec per user is required while in the latter case the required per user capacity drops to 6.4K bit/sec. Test results showed that, even with a 10% packet loss, effective voice quality ranged from fair to poor. And with an increased level of packet loss, quality results became even worse.

What are the implications of these results for network managers considering the implementation of VoIP? The implications of effectively implementing VoIP on a broad scale include managing products that support effective network capacity planning as well as operational capacity management, which is a necessary pre-requisite for any broad-based deployment of VoIP services. Therefore, if VoIP is to happen in the enterprise in any major way, management product support will have to significantly expand beyond today's meager levels.