What steps should be taken to improve Digital Voice service levels?
Latency and jitter really go hand in hand in most Digital Voice deployments. To effectively manage both, administrators should focus on reducing delay at the network endpoint and prioritizing traffic over the network. Optimizations of jitter buffering and packet size are good first steps to improving service quality at the endpoint. Endpoint delays can also be reduced by adhering to a standard packet size, using the G.711 codec, and avoiding asynchronous transcoding. Prioritizing Digital Voice traffic over the network at Layers 2 and 3 also yields latency and jitter improvements. Policy based network management, bandwidth reservation, Type of Service, Class of Service, and Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) are all widely used techniques for prioritizing Digital Voice traffic at Layers 2 and 3. Various solutions are available for Digital Voice packet loss. These include: packet loss concealment which hides the audible effects of lost packets; root cause analysis of individual switch
