Top 5 unified communications woes and how to solve them

Unified communications is one of those essential ingredients of daily enterprise productivity we can't any longer live without.

But no matter the proficiency of your IT department's back end and your general VoIP infrastructure, you'll probably recognise several of the niggles below as you go about your daily business with audio and video collaboration tools.

Luckily, we've had a chat with UC&C experts at NetScout to figure out some solutions to the most common hiccups:

5. There's silence on the other end of the line

You call into the conference, and it sounds like there's nobody there. Unless some wag changed the conference bridge number at the last minute, there could be a number of reasons for the problem here.

Your network is the most likely candidate, of course. NetScout suggests:

"The firewall or the routers may be blocking voice traffic, or there may be diverse routing in the network with no return path."

Meanwhile, NetScout suggests that edge devices - i.e. hardware on the perimeter of the network such as phones, laptops and the usual suspects - could be blocking traffic for their own, external peering traffic.

"Routing issues may be making it difficult for media streams to reach the destination, or endpoints could be having trouble communicating with the call server," NetScout continues.

Meanwhile, don't forget to check your call servers - there may be an issue affecting call transmission there, and finally the session border controller (SBC) could be the villain of the piece. In the SBC, it's good to check blocked traffic due to failure or bad configuration, or a number of issues between the call server and the SIP (session initiation protocol) trunk.

4. Video conference quality is sub-par

Another common one, this. Advantageous for when you want to stay in your jammies and have nobody notice, but being a series of grey squares doesn't always present the most professional image.

Again, the place to start in sorting this one out is with your network - misconfiguration again. But beyond that, the conference bridge itself could be the next port of call:

"There may be interoperability or codec selection issues," suggests NetScout.
The codec may also not actually be set up to deal with any network issues that are affecting performance, so all in all, check your codec.

Top 5 unified communications woes and how to solve them

3. You can't dial out at all

It's a slightly less common problem, but an inability to dial out of your own network is a biggie if and when it happens.

NetScout's first thought on this is around endpoints, which simply may be having their own trouble connecting to the call server.

That aside, "the call server could be having problems communicating with external peers - firewalls, permissions or configuration errors," says NetScout.
SBC-wise, interoperability between call server and SIP trunk is worth a look, too.

2. Calls drop off completely

The dreaded call drop is one of the most common afflictions of any important conference call. But why does it happen?

The SBC could be a likely candidate again.

"Configurations such as error session timeout and keepalive (KA) signals may not be set correctly," suggests NetScout.

"Also, traffic may be blocked because of a failure or misconfiguration, while there could be performance issues between the server and the SIP trunk."

In the call server, that timeout and KA issue could also raise its head again, while network-wise, you should be mindful of the firewall or router periodically blocking or not routing signalling and voice traffic correctly.

WAN issues at the site you're calling into should also be investigated, network prioritisation of signalling protocols could be set incorrectly, or routing issues could be delaying media streams - or cutting them off completely.

"Finally, endpoints may be having trouble communicating with the call server," says NetScout.

So, lots to check up on if your calls are dropping.

Top 5 unified communications woes and how to solve them

1. The call quality is terrible

The original, and best. You can connect quite easily, but nothing is quite right - the call quality is off, and nobody is terribly sure why.

Aside from the usual meatsack errors of joining a call while driving through a tunnel (please don't join a business conference call while driving at all - that's just a free safety tip), sitting miles away from the microphone or positioning yourself next to a noisy basket of dogs, there's a whole host of genuine technological concerns that can be the source of fuzzy and indistinct lines.

First of all, check your network.

"There may not be enough bandwidth," says NetScout, "or Quality of Service (QoS) is misconfigured".

Rogue applications or network devices could also be eating into the bandwidth - so check those background apps and make sure nobody's illicitly streaming HD video or using torrents.
Call server problems could come in the form of misconfigured or simply wrong codecs on call setup, while the gateway's echo cancelers may not be working effectively.

SBC issues with bad call quality include, says NetScout, "configuration issues negotiating the wrong codec on call setup, or QoS reclassification is incorrect".

But it's the endpoint itself that may be the most prevalent source of woes.

"Echo and noise cancellers may not be working effectively, or soft-client performance could be a problem," NetScout suggests.

"Packet-loss concealment or jitter-buffer (the shared data area on a VoIP server) configuration may be an issue."

Finally, if you're using Microsoft Lync in particular, it may be as simple as the end-user devices not being optimised for it. This can be remedied with various software solutions from third parties, or even shelling out on Microsoft's own recognised optimised hardware.