John, Re: "Has anyone heard VOIP marred by congested WAN links - not good so far. And is 24 voice channels per T-1 efficient? JFD
Since Intel is involved in VoIP, this relates to Intel:
Re: "Has anyone heard VOIP marred by congested WAN links?"
It can be. Whenever too many packets are being delayed, dropped or lost, the speech quality goes down. And WAN links, especially the pipes to overseas locations, can be crowded.
It's hard to exactly say where the congestion is occurring and it depends on the exact path that's being traversed. It could be a link, a router, the gateway out of your company, a transatlantic connection. But the root cause is over-subscription to some facility that's in the way.
Ever get net congestion with Net Meeting? Too many packets for too many users.
And routers do not guarantee "no data loss" by resending data that's lost: End-to-end integrity only happens with TCP and it's the responsibility of the end-points to ask for retransmits. And with VoIP or UDP traffic, no guarantees, and the policy is brutal: if there are too many cars on the bridge, throw some off until traffic gets moving again.
And nobody owns it. The government is not responsible for this area of
traffic. The ownership is with MCI, Sprint, PacBell, etc.
I don't know currently what areas of the Internet are overloaded, and it's a constantly changing game. Traffic keeps growing to fill up any available capacity.
Re: "And is 24 voice channels per T-1 efficient?"
Normally, 24 channels (24*64000 bps is more or less a T1 line) is the limit.
But with compressed, packetized voice, the rules are completely different depending on the quality you demand. If you compress voice into 5000 bps, divide that into 1,544,000 bps, this gives you about 309 ports, which is more than 24. Who is the leader in ports/chassi? Intel? LU? Where is Cisco in all of this?
About Intranets, in the scenario discussed, reliability is dependent upon traffic. This issue is a slightly different ballgame on the Intranets, which are managed infrastructures.
Aside from the growth opportunities, I sense it's a good thing Intel is getting involved, and to the benefit of Intel and Cisco. The bottom-line is: Intel is very motivated to ensure computer chip growth, as well as be the leading component supplier of the building blocks to the Internet and Intranets.
Even with the issues of reliability, the international growth on VoIP is rather impressive. The dollar savings (i.e. no international line charges or limited charges) are so enormous, that these types of customers are quite motivated.
Regards,
Amy J |
