5 tips for getting your network ready for videoconferencing

Computerworld - Converged networks that handle data, voice, and video and that allow for collaboration and videoconferencing are the Holy Grail for networking administrators. The benefits of such networks and applications are substantial, ranging from significant cost reductions by eliminating redundant voice networks, to increased productivity due to collaboration and videoconferencing technologies.

But preparing a network to handle demanding collaboration and videoconferencing applications is not as simple as adding some extra bandwidth and plugging in a few video cameras and IP phones. It may require network reconfiguration, as well as a change in the way companies do business. Unless the network is prepared properly, conferencing and collaboration can become a time and money sink, rather than a benefit.

To help network administrators prepare their networks, experts and administrators who have been through the process were asked how they made it work.  Here's the advice they offer.

Profile your network and match it to your applications

The first step toward preparing your network is to profile it and get a baseline understanding of its performance, including bandwidth demands, application usage, latency, and packet loss, said Manickam Sridhar, chief technology officer of Converged Access, a provider of WAN traffic management technology, based in Littleton, Mass..

"Ninety-nine percent of those who install collaboration and videoconferencing have little knowledge of what is going on in their networks," Sridhar said.

Armed with such a profile, you should compare your network's capabilities to the technical needs of the collaborative and conferencing applications you'll install,  and then tune your network for the applications, he said.

Key to doing this is  understanding that conferencing and collaboration do not behave like simple data applications such as Web browsing. Collaborative applications, such as workgroup and application-sharing, suffer when there is too much network latency, so latency should be minimized before installing them. Even more demanding are videoconferencing and VoIP, Sridhar said, which both become unusable when there is packet loss. So networks that will use those applications need to be tuned to eliminate as much packet loss as possible.

Redesign your network -- and consider outsourcing

Collaboration and conferencing applications put serious demand on networks, and so in some cases, a network redesign may be required. Sridhar recommended creating a VLAN for the conferencing and collaboration applications as a way to shield desktop users on the rest of the network from being bogged down when collaboration and conferencing is used. He also said that network switches must be configured to provide high priority for videoconferencing over other uses, as a way to ensure that video looks as lifelike as possible.

Administrators should also take into account the different levels of quality available for videoconferencing, because higher quality requires higher bandwidth, which translates into higher network and bandwidth costs. So you need to determine for what purposes the video will be used,  and then determine if you can get by with lower bandwidth.