VoIP **Must Be Partnership** between Your Voice AND Data Vendors

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Voice Over IP must be an endeavor approached with a core team of competent voice specialists as well as data specialists. Sometimes your vendor for both functions is one in the same. More often however, you have an IT department or staff person or an outsourced IT firm that takes care of your computer network.

Understandably, the IT group does not want another vendor "messing" with their network and often there are security/firewall settings to be considered. The voice vendor understands this and truly does not want to get involved in your computer network. However, by definition of Voice Over IP, there's key network-related information that must be provided to or at least communicated to the voice vendor and vice versa. For a successful installation, the project must be carefully coordinated among both parties. Here are the common ROLES and RESPONSIBILITIES involved and below are some tips on what to do if there are problems:

Your VOICE vendor:

• Offer options and selection of VoIP carriers and solutions right for your application.
• Plan, project manage and provision phone numbers and call routing implemented over a data connection (WAN or LAN).
• Make sure phone numbers get ported properly.
• Troubleshoot and project manage with carrier if there are issues.
• Install and configure your phone system if applicable.
• Advise IT staff or configure Managed Layer 3 Ethernet switches for prioritization of Voice or Quality of Service (QoS).
• Take care of handsets and phone system and training of staff and administrators.
• If a new Internet connection is involved, the voice vendor must advise the data vendor of new blocks of IP addresses provided by the new carrier.
• Advocate on your behalf with the phone company for installation dates and post-sale billing and credits.

Your DATA vendor:

• Provide a network schematic (picture or Visio drawing) of your computer network now AND how it will look with VoIP introduced.
• Provide IP addresses for the phone system and/or the carrier-provided "box" on premise
• Provide subnet mask, gateway, and primary and secondary DNS IP addresses
• Open specified data ports per the VoIP carrier requests (extremely important!)
• Make sure the network is "clean" -- no packet loss and minimum or Zero network latency.
• If there is excessive network latency, troubleshoot and eliminate.
• If preferred, configure managed Layer 3 Ethernet switches for prioritization of Voice or Quality of Service (QoS).

If there are issues with your VoIP installation or times when voice quality is not the best, you should get both vendors on a conference call together and assign responsbilities and timeframes for resolution. Voice over IP will never CAUSE network latency or packet loss but it will REVEAL it. This is because unlike email or other data applications, voice is very sensitive to timing -- if a voice packet arrives one millisecond late because of network delay, the voice will be garbled. If an email arrives one millisecond late, rarely will anyone notice.

Also ask for documentation of everything by both vendors including ticket numbers opened with telco carriers and verification of ports that should be opened by the data vendor on the network. It cannot be understated that Voice Over IP installations must be meticulously coordinated between your voice and data vendors.