Planning for VOIP Traffic Loads

Josh Stevens, self-described Head Geek at a company called Solar Winds, has a really great, practical blog. Recently, he tackled the issue of how and when to do your capacity planning for wide area links as part of a VOIP rollout.

Josh Stevens, self-described Head Geek at a company called Solar Winds, has a really great, practical blog. Recently, he tackled the issue of how and when to do your capacity planning for wide area links as part of a VOIP rollout.If you set this beside my earlier post about Beckman Coulter's experience, in which raw bandwidth served the purpose, you get not so much a contradiction as an illustration of Josh's point: These things are highly experiential: You might be able to deploy VOIP on your WAN and get quality that's just fine by doing nothing other than boosting bandwidth. But:

1.) That may or may not be the long-term answer; and

2.) That may or may not be the right answer for someone else.

So it seems to me that if you can get by on bandwidth alone, count yourself lucky but don't get too comfortable.