Voice and Convergence
Delivering the highest quality voice over the WAN
Voice over IP (VoIP), IP Telephony (IPT), and Unified Communications face considerable barriers to achieve their promise of flexible new ways to work and significant savings from consolidating services and infrastructure. Blue Coat helps you deliver on the promise of voice on a converged network.
Assess and monitor the converged network
Assessing the readiness of your network is essential to a successful VoIP deployment. Will the same WAN bandwidth today support your VoIP effort tomorrow? If not, can you borrow additional bandwidth from recreational applications? Or do you have to add capacity? Just as critically, you need to understand and control the impact of new voice traffic on your existing applications – and the impact these applications will have on voice quality.
Blue Coat discovers and monitors all your applications:
- Complete application layer intelligence to reveal what is running on your network
- Measure and report how much bandwidth each application uses
- Deliver voice-specific statistics, reporting and alarms
- Ensure compliance with service levels for consistent voice quality
Eliminate the Causes of Poor Voice Quality
Data networks are unpredictable and suffer periodic congestion that degrades performance. While data can recover, voice quality is much more sensitive to round trip latencies. In today’s networks with so many applications contending for bandwidth across the WAN it is VoIP quality that suffers first. Congestion becomes the barrier to high-quality voice until you are able to offer each call the resources it needs. Even when identifying voice, router-based queuing schemes cannot deliver guaranteed voice quality, and MPLS often disappoints. With Blue Coat, you are able to:
- Discover applications, tracks network utilization, monitor application performance.
- Leverage application-level QoS to ensure VoIP gets the bandwidth it needs, per session or per call.
- Cap and contain bandwidth hungry applications, including recreational traffic, to make the most of your existing bandwidth.
Find out more about our solutions for voice and convergence
