Tertiary Education
A tertiary education provider operates an IP Telephony-based contact centre for thousands of students. Since migration to this system, students began to complain about poor voice quality - a problem which the system integrator could not solve.
When asked to perform an independent analysis, Pentech found that the network switches that provide LAN aggregation did not have Quality of Service (QoS) configured correctly. This meant that during times of peak network traffic, the IP Telephony packets could be delayed or even dropped by the network resulting in poor voice quality. When we configured the switches to implement QoS, the voice quality problems disappeared.
Some integrators or vendors argue that you do not need QoS when you have a fast network but, in this case, we proved them wrong.
Our customer is satisfied, the contact centre and students are happy with the consistently good voice quality and the problem was permanently resolved without the need for any additional equipment or software.
Government
A major government department operates an IP-based contact centre for public and internal communications which offers cost efficiencies by sharing the IP network with data applications. All calls made to or from the contact centre are also recorded on IP-based systems on the same network.
Problems started occurring with voice quality degradation and calls being dropped for no apparent reason. When the incumbent network integrator and the system manufacturer failed to resolve the problem, we were asked to help.
We analysed the network design, configuration and actual traffic flows and discovered two serious problems:
- The system had been implemented in a way that caused excessive network traffic to traverse the core network under certain conditions. This was a fundamental design flaw.
- The core network equipment had been configured incorrectly exacerbating the problem.
After we had fixed the network configuration problem, network traffic in the core reduced by 60% and the voice quality problems and call drops disappeared. However, we also recommended a change to the IP Telephony and voice recording design, recommendations which were accepted and scheduled in their programme of work.
The contact centre voice quality problems and call drops were resolved and a plan is in place to further optimise the environment. We resolved the problems without the need for any additional equipment or software.