How do you ensure quality of your Unified Communication (UC) solutions?

July 12, 2024 by viva

Quality of Service (QoS) is often the most important part of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between the providers and customers. This is what drives the success of any UC deployment.

What is the significance of QoS in UC?

In an UC environment, QoS helps maintain high levels of quality for Voice over IP (VoIP) and video calls. Any degradation in call quality would result in poor customer experience and remove the stickiness.

Firstly, let us define the possible quality issues when it comes to VoIP and video communication. There are three key quality issues that affect the QoS:

Packet loss – can happen due to hardware failure, software corruption, weak signal strength or a combination of these factors. This would result in poor voice quality – jitter, call errors, and missing piece of audio
Jitter – unwanted sound in a call, image distortion and image flickering
Latency – WAN latency, network latency, Internet latency, interrupt latency and audio latency

Given these issues, how do we ensure QoS?

There are tools that can help ensure QoS and at the same time, you can follow a number of good practices to ensure QoS. Some of those include:

Traffic shaping

You can prioritize traffic where you can give preference to voice and video traffic over any other data traffic. Even better would be to dedicate a separate Internet connection for the UC platform that would ensure that the communication quality is good for the business purpose.

Jitter buffer

Usage of Jitter buffer would ensure that they collect and store voice packets before passing them to the voice processor. It allows voice packets to be delivered at equal intervals with minimal distortion to end-users

MPLS

Multiprotocol Label Switching is a routing technique used to shape traffic across an enterprise WAN. It forwards data packets at the switching level, rather than the routing level and takes a few steps to reach the packet’s destination.

SD-WAN

Software-defined WAN determines the most effective way for packets to reach its destination and distributes it efficiently. This is centrally managed and can be deployed across your WAN with zero-touch provisioning easily.

Maintaining the best possible communication experience is of utmost priority for businesses. Any UC deployment is completely driven by the QoS that provider offers towards ensuring quality communication.

After all, businesses happen through relationships and transactions and the most important component is communication.