Network VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) refers to the technology that enables voice communication and multimedia sessions over the internet or other IP-based networks. Instead of using traditional telephone lines, VoIP converts voice signals into digital data packets, which are transmitted over the internet. This allows for various communication options, including voice and video calls, multimedia messaging, and integration with other services and applications, such as email and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. VoIP typically reduces costs for companies, compared to traditional phone services.
Key components and features of network VoIP include:
Organizations of all sizes use VoIP for cost-effective communication, enabling voice and video calls, conferencing, and collaboration tools. It helps streamline operations and reduce long-distance call costs. VoIP is also key for remote workers, helping to maintain connectivity with colleagues and clients from any location without relying on traditional phone lines. Any kind of business and organization can use VoIP, including educational institutions for distance learning and healthcare providers for telemedicine visits. Individuals and families use VoIP, too – just think of Skype and Zoom.
VoIP has come a long way since its early days in the mid-1990s, when it was mostly a niche technology used by tech enthusiasts. The concept of sending voice over the internet gained traction with the launch of platforms like Skype in 2003, which made it easy for anyone to make free or low-cost calls from their computers. As internet speeds improved and broadband became more common, VoIP started catching on in businesses, helping them achieve significant savings on long-distance calls. Over the years, it evolved to support not just voice but also video calls and messaging, making it an essential tool for everything from casual chats with friends to serious conference calls in the corporate world. Today, VoIP is everywhere, reshaping how we communicate both personally and professionally. The global VoIP market is expected to reach over $100 billion by 2025.
While the promises of VoIP are significant, adopting VoIP also comes with real challenges:
Let's look at how NIKSUN can solve all these challenges for network VoIP.
Problem: VoIP call quality suffers when your internet connection is unstable.
Solution: NIKSUN's end-to-end, network-to-application solution continuously tracks key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics for network traffic and VoIP performance, such as call quality, latency, and jitter. By monitoring these parameters in real-time, the platform can quickly identify any fluctuations, deteriorations, or anomalies that could impact VoIP calls, allowing for immediate troubleshooting before users experience disruptions.
Problem: VoIP traffic must be managed effectively, or call quality is likely to degrade.
Solution: NIKSUN's comprehensive solution assists in enforcing QoS policies by classifying and prioritizing VoIP traffic over less time-sensitive data. This ensures that voice packets are transmitted with the necessary bandwidth and low latency, improving the overall call quality and user experience, especially during peak usage times. Essential management and trending reports (periodic or on-demand) allow you to easily investigate historical events and plan for future network needs. Real-time alarms for user-defined thresholds, in conjunction with rich VoIP, QoS, and QoE metrics (SEER, ASR, NER, ISA, MoS, Jitter, Loss, and more) improve operational processes by facilitating moment-to-moment awareness of the availability of VoIP-specific services and applications, while offering capabilities to correlate users' media and signaling transactions, QoS and QoE values. What's more, our solution grows with you, supporting scalability for networks up to 100Gbps (clusterable to multi-Tbps) and all major protocols and codecs.
Problem: VoIP systems are vulnerable to hacking, eavesdropping, and cyber threats.
Solution: NIKSUN all-in-one platform enhances your ability to tackle sophisticated threats through comprehensive performance, compliance, and security alarming techniques, such as Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), anomaly detection, and content analysis. NIKSUN's platform ingests, retains, analyzes, and cross-correlates a wide variety of data sources – logs, flows, packets, SNMP, and more — for fast, powerful root-cause analysis that identifies any deviations from baseline network behavior, such as sudden spikes in traffic that can signal potential security threats like a DDoS attack. NIKSUN also allows you to incorporate auto-updated threat intelligence feeds (both NIKSUN's and third-party feeds) to ensure your entire organization is monitored for the latest vulnerabilities, attack techniques, malwares/ransomwares, blacklisted IPs, etc. This multifaceted approach means NIKUN can spot a broad spectrum of attacks with incredible speed, safeguarding the stability and security of your entire infrastructure while preserving the quality of your VoIP communications.
Problem: Integrating VoIP monitoring tools with your existing system and tools can be a headache.
Solution: NIKSUN offers easy-to-setup integrations with all your apps, databases, and servers from our powerful UI. Because NIKSUN leverages packet, log, and other data-based monitoring, it works out of the box with all VoIP systems. With lots of customization options, NIKSUN lets you easily create your own dashboards, alarms, and alerts and offers a multitude of out-of-box options for reporting, alarming, and filtering, as well. This makes it easy to set up the NIKSUN's platform specifically for your needs while incorporating your existing tools.
Plus, NIKSUN is an all-in-one solution, ensuring it can watch over all the data from your entire existing VoIP infrastructure, since our one-stop solution truly does it all!
Problem: Special IT support might be needed for VoIP, and that can get expensive.
Solution: NIKSUN's goal from the get-go was to create a solution that was easy to set up and returned 100-percent data-driven intelligence that would be usable by anyone immediately, while proving extremely cost effective for organizations of any size. For VoIP monitoring in particular, we set out to create a solution that captured and stored VoIP diagnostic information for extended periods of time, extracted key metrics and trends from converged environments, and eliminated the manual element in troubleshooting by providing statistical and packet information on a per-call basis (MOS, jitter, loss, CDF, QoE, etc.). Tools like color-coded, multi-stage bounce diagrams would allow managers and highly technical users, alike, to visualize diagnostics of network delay with both historical trends and granular views down to microseconds. We also wanted a holistic platform, so that users wouldn't be forced to hop between tools to get the answers or actionable insights they required. And we achieved our goal! What does that mean for VoIP deployments? It means a much more cost-effective way to deploy and maintain your infrastructure. Use your existing team and the comprehensive, intuitive NIKSUN platform to keep tabs on your VoIP system – no major expertise required.
NIKSUN is the recognized world leader in empowering organizations to Know the Unknown®. Since 1997, we have been committed to delivering the most innovative solutions for securing and optimizing the networks of over a thousand customers including Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and service providers.
Our industry leading suite of scalable, forensics-based cyber security and network performance monitoring products provide customers with in-depth and actionable insight into security threats, performance issues, and compliance risks. NIKSUN's patented real-time analysis and recording technology is the industry's most comprehensive solution for securing and maintaining dynamic network infrastructure.