Here's a useful blog post by Terry Slattery of Chesapeke Netcraftsmen. Terry was CTO at Netcordia, a network management vendor, before going over to the consultant side, and he's delivering a management/troubleshooting tutorial at VoiceCon Orlando next month.In his post, Terry addresses something I haven't seen much attention paid to: The use of access control lists (ACLs) and network address assignment in IP telephony.
I naturally associate ACLs and network addressing with security, and Terry indicates that security is, indeed, a major point when you're dealing with ACLs and addresses. But he also notes the important role that these network management elements can play in your network quality of service (QoS) strategy.
I keep going back to the blog that John Bartlett posted here a couple of days ago on QOS for voice vs. QOS for video. QOS has a lot of angles that aren't readily apparent or simple; as Terry notes in his blog, some telecom/IT folks even occasionally opt not to deal with it at all, pre-deployment, because its complexity can hold up the process. The problem, as Terry notes, is that not dealing with it up front can give you a time-consuming problem down the road.
One thing I think we'll confront going forward is that, whatever you consider for voice, you'll have to weigh the impact on video as well. Whether that's QOS, security, network addressing, ACLs, or the many other issues I'm not even imagining, the work of making your network voice- and video-ready is complex, and will likely get more so.
