Don't Get Hung Up on Remote Site Call Quality Issues

The global market for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is expected to reach about $103 billion by 2026. Digital transformations show no signs of slowing down, relying heavily on collaboration via voice and video services delivered through VoIP. As the importance of VoIP technology continues to grow, ensuring the uninterrupted performance of voice and video communications becomes even more essential for organizations to provide quality digital experiences, empower the hybrid workforce, and support remote site operations. 

Breaking Down the Risks of Communication Breakdowns

Without continuous end-through-end visibility into network and application performance at remote locations, IT teams can lose valuable time, productivity, and, in turn, revenue by troubleshooting inefficiently. When call quality degradations occur, visibility gaps at the remote sites can significantly increase mean time to repair (MTTR). Lost packets, jitter, and dropped VoIP calls can be a serious setback for organizations in any industry working at a variety of remote office locations. For example:

• Government officials and contact center agents tasked with fielding constituent inquiries in real time
• Retail customer service representatives working to meet service-level agreements (SLAs) when addressing service issues and customer concerns
• Manufacturers communicate between plant locations to schedule shipments and deliveries
• Financial services experts recording client calls to avoid confusion and compliance issues
• Healthcare providers leveraging wireless devices to discuss patient care and treatment plans safely and accurately

Often, because of the interconnected and complex nature of modern IT ecosystems, performance issues experienced within the enterprise may originate from an outside source. IT teams lacking remote site visibility will likely lose valuable time trying to prove that the problem did not originate from their equipment applying the wrong quality of service (QoS) class, creating capacity issues, or generating bandwidth bottlenecks.

Whenever You Call, NETSCOUT Will Answer

By using real-time insights and packet-level data from nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions, IT teams can quickly pinpoint the true root cause of degradations and provide evidence to third parties and WAN providers that may be the source of the issue. In today’s workforce, traffic is no longer limited to data centers. Now, it may pass through cloud environments, colocations, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) applications, third parties, and remote locations. Along the way, any packet loss, jitter, latency, or dropped calls will increase employee frustration as call quality suffers.

To support global operations at remote sites and ensure quality communications for employees, today’s largest enterprises leverage NETSCOUT solutions for deep packet inspection (DPI) at scale. Serving as a single source of truth, packets are the fundamental building blocks of digital communication. Comprehensive packet-level data provides network and security teams the visibility they need to ensure the performance of critical VoIP technology. Using the nGeniusONE solution to triage service issues and interpret NETSCOUT Smart Data from InfiniStreamNG appliances, organizations can drill down into call conversations where problems emerge. With NETSCOUT instrumentation in place, IT teams are able to increase their visibility across remote locations and all infrastructure components associated with delivering IP-based services such as voice and video.

Unlike other management tools, NETSCOUT solutions leveraging DPI reveal the robust details necessary to deliver answers to the problems impacting VoIP performance. Some of these details include:

• Insights into call setup protocols such as SIP and H.323
• Recognition of codecs in use
• Monitoring and analysis of media traffic such as Real-Time Transport (RTP)
• Analysis of call quality impairments impacting users including latency, packet loss, jitter, dropped calls, mean option score (MOS) analysis, and QoS class assignments
• Breakdown of call session details with per-hop behavior analysis
• User experience testing and analysis from each remote office, configurable for the voice services your organization has in use
• Tracking and trending of voice, video, and other business data services together, providing utilization views at every location in a single pane for complete troubleshooting and capacity planning

Once the root of the problem is clearly identified, nGeniusONE alerting and reporting capabilities allow IT teams to implement proactive measures to prevent recurring issues. By continuously capturing and comparing trended packet-level information, organizations can be sure that remote site employees experience reliable network and application performance and high-quality VoIP calls from anywhere, at any time.

Learn more about how this organization used nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solutions to improve user experience, eliminate visibility gaps, and identify the true root cause of remote site call quality issues between its corporate headquarters in Europe and a remote office in the United States.