Why you should monitor VoIP for QoS

The benefits of Voice over IP (VoIP) and unified communications (UC) start to lose their luster when the basics – such as being able to hear the other party during a voice call – don’t perform reliably.

While most of us have suffered through calls with poor cellular reception, it is another issue entirely to make a sales call in the office and have the latency and jitter that can sometimes accompany digital calling. Bottom line: it’s simply unacceptable. Quality of service matters, especially for business VoIP, and that’s where VoIP monitoring comes into play.

Fixing issues with VoIP quality is not easy; there are several links in the chain, and IT can easily waste several afternoons trying to discover where the problem exists. Often operational support teams have to try this or that and look and hunt in several different places in order to try to figure out what’s causing their problem, and that’s a huge burden. It delays resolution of problems and creates service level issues.

This is exactly why VoIP monitoring is crucial for VoIP quality of service (QoS). There needs to be visibility on all quality factors to properly keep the network humming along smoothly, since factors such as a clogged network or malfunctioning router can quickly turn the wonders of VoIP into… well, something less wonderful.