A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

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For quite a few years, we’ve run a session during VoiceCon that essentially asks: Is Your Data Network Ready for Voice? While the format and details have evolved over the years, the session’s fundamental purpose remains unchanged-to examine what’s required by way of upgrades and capabilities to transition a data-only network into one that can carry voice and other real-time traffic. The reason the session remains popular and on the agenda is simple: If your data network isn’t ready for voice, IP Telephony is a non-starter.

As the next phase of enterprise communications capabilities-UC-begins to show up in real-world deployments, I can’t help but wonder what the ripple effects will be on overall network architecture, design and capabilities. To be sure, most UC deployments are running on networks that already have been upgraded for IP Telephony, and the UC capabilities and applications we’ve seen to date don’t generate huge spikes in traffic. But I’ve yet to see a new communications capability or feature that didn’t have unanticipated consequences for the underlying network.

For example, as companies began experimenting with social networking tools, they encountered a series of unexpected challenges. Some of these problems first impacted the carriers-e.g., “Social Networking and Web 2.0 Creating DNS Performance Issues for Carriers,” Mar 6, 2007, at circleid.com; and “Social Networking to Stress Carrier Network Infrastructures,” Feb 23, 2007, at xchangemag.com)-but they soon trickled down to enterprise, university and government networks-see “How MySpace is Hurting Your Network,” and “Social Networking Sites Drive Up DNS Traffic, Bandwidth,” in Network World, June 22, 2007.

In addition to the DNS problem, the Network World article notes, “the ‘MySpace Effect’ is expected to hit many more nets soon, as these network-intensive interactive features migrate from specialty sites to mainstream e-commerce operations and intranets.” Some enterprise networks have already reacted by blocking access to public Web 2.0 websites, but that’s not likely to be a sustainable answer for the long term. Moreover, that response begs the question of what will happen as enterprise-versions of MySpace and Facebook are deployed and become integrated with UC?

At a minimum, DNS infrastructures eventually will have to be upgraded, but network architects also will have to design networks differently to account for new traffic patterns, particularly if demand for video grows, both as a consequence of social networking and if initiatives like Cisco’s Telepresence take off. The amount of small, interactive traffic will rise, as will demand for large hunks of bandwidth to accommodate video.

If history is any guide, the one truism is that new communications capabilities can’t be deployed in a vacuum, particularly those that have far-reaching business process effects like UC. In addition to network design, we’re going to need new tools to monitor, troubleshoot and manage UC traffic and applications, new security problems are likely to emerge, as is the need for new application-performance capabilities.

None of this is meant to suggest that you should hold off on planning, piloting or deploying UC. It is, however, strongly advised that you consider a broad range of network-related capacity and performance issues.

If there was one lesson that was common to virtually all of the early adopters of IP Telephony, it was that they underestimated the amount of time-and the scope of issues-that needed to be devoted to pre-deployment needs assessment and planning. As we migrate to UC, let’s not make that same mistake again.

What do you think? Drop me a line at fknight@cmp.com or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.

Fred Knight
GM/Co-Chair, VoiceCon
Publisher, Business Communications Review

Posted in Applications, Architecture, Equipment, Fred Knight, Implementation, Social Networking, Unified Communications |

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