February 2009 Archives

Traditional telephone services have typically gained a reputation of providing excellent voice quality and superior reliability. Consequently, users take for granted that their phone systems will provide high quality with virtually no downtime. Yet many VoIP installations fail to met these expectations primarily because organizations have not adequately evaluated their network infrastructure to determine whether it can adequately support applications that are very sensitive to latency, packet loss, and jitter. These three "monsters" that may remain unnoticed in a data network will become very obvious and ugly in VoIP systems.

If you're interested in improving your current (or future) IP telephony experience, check out Jay Botelho's (Director of Product Management at Wildpackets) slide presentation that focuses on best practices to troubleshooting converged networks at: http://www.slideshare.net/wildpackets/improving-the-ip-telephony-experience.

In the presentation, viewers will learn about how to test their network(s) before installing a VoIP system to identify and correct performance troubles as well as proactive troubleshooting techniques and using qualitative and quantitative analysis. Learn about ...

  • The importance of Quality of Service (QoS) parameters to enable network devices to prioritize and give preference to packet streams that are sensitive to delay, packet loss, jitter, and other performance inhibitors.
  • Network traffic pattern changes to look for that adversely affect VoIP
  • The importance of providing alerts when VoIP performance declines
  • Proactive troubleshooting tricks and tips that lead to a reliable VoIP implementation with first-rate voice quality.

If you are responsible for determining the health of your network before deploying VoIP, need to rid the network of VoIP-killing troubles before installation, or want to be equipped to assess the network when VoIP-killing troubles arise, you'll want to digest this slide presentation.
We are excited that Network World's recent review of WLAN tools awarded WildPackets'
OmniPeek a perfect score of 5.0!

In total, six products were reviewed in a WLAN "bake-off" of sorts. OmniPeek received the highest scores possible in each category - features, ease of use, documentation, and installation.

In the review, Craig Mathias, principal at Farpoint Group, notes -- "OmniPeek's flexibility is first-rate... The product also enables a high degree of customization, including the ability to extend analysis with custom code (for specialized protocols). Complete filtering is also provided, allowing a user to focus only on particular packets or protocols ... Overall, this product was by far the easiest to use. We had to turn to the manual only to rate the documentation's quality, which was also excellent."

We couldn't agree more!

To view the entire review, check out http://www.networkworld.com/reviews/2009/011909/2009/011909-wlan-test-wildpackets.html