The need to plan and manage the impact of VoIP deployment on an existing LAN has become a process called VoIP Lifecycle Management (VLM). No one created this process in a single ah-ha moment; customers, carriers, and VoIP engineers developed it over time while companies began deploying VoIP. They realized that as soon as VoIP was active on the LAN, it had a large, negative impact in ways they never expected. Challenges still appeared from time to time, even after the companies addressed the immediate problems. Six months or a year later, after everyone thought they had the VoIP part of their LAN under control, their businesses grew or evolved. They deployed more VoIP phones and sent more data through the LAN. The hardware grew old and overworked, and it began to fail.
The constant evolution of data and voice consumption on any LAN means you can never stop maintaining and managing it. After years of reacting to the new situations created by VoIP, customers, carriers, and VoIP engineers realized they need to manage the application before it breaks. Those who ignored this need to plan, analyze, and test are still dealing with major problems on their VoIP networks today.
There are three stages of VoIP Lifecycle Management:
Stage 1 — Analysis: The first step in any solid VoIP deployment. It involves analyzing your existing network to confirm it can handle the increased workload of a VoIP deployment. The section “Analyzing Your Bandwidth,” later in this topic, covers this stage of VoIP Lifecycle Management.
Stage 2 — Installation/verification: This stage covers the process of activating VoIP on your network, validating all the hardware, and testing all aspects and features employed on VoIP. topics 8 and 9 talk about this stage of VoIP Lifecycle Management.
Stage 3 — Ongoing monitoring: This phase of Lifecycle Management never ends. Every month, quarter, half-year, or year, you need to re-evaluate your network to identify trends and prevent problems before they impact service. Companies don’t stay the same; they’re always either expanding or contracting. Regardless of which way your business is moving, it’ll have different data and voice requirements six months from now, compared to today.
Industry estimates identify a 50-percent chance of failing to successfully transition to VoIP if you ignore the stages of VoIP Lifecycle Management.
It’s rare if any company has definitive data on bandwidth consumption, peak usage, collisions, errors, and hardware degradation on data LANs, pre-planning for VoIP deployment is all the more essential. You can much more easily do the research now while everyone in your office is calm, instead of trying to fix a problem a few months from now when everyone’s nerves are frayed and they just want their calls to complete cleanly.
