What steps should be taken to improve VoIP service levels?
Latency and jitter really go hand in hand in most VoIP deployments. To effectively manage both, administrators should focus on reducing delay at the network endpoint and prioritizing traffic over the network. Optimization 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 VoIP 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 VoIP traffic at Layers 2 and 3. Various solutions are available for VoIP packet loss. These include: packet loss concealment which hides the audible effects of lost packets; root cause analysis of individual switches and routers along the network path
