The Packet Rag

WANCare - Our Newest Offering

2008-12-13T22:12:15-08:00

Through our considerable experience offering lifecycle management tools designed to allow easy troubleshooting of issues with converged networks, we have learned that sending a call across a network can expose a multitude of sins within both the LAN and the WAN. Now, we have announced a new service that will prove useful even for those who don't currently offer VoIP - WANCare.

Our new WANCare product is simply an additional configuration of our existing micro appliances to send a continuous highly compressed (2kbps) call across the WAN to another micro appliance or media sink. The reports that are generated give a continuous picture of what the WAN looks like at any given moment in time - allowing an IT manager or service provider to look at any patterns that may emerge, and take proactive action.

WANCare would make a great addition to an existing VoIPCare installation - or a great new troubleshooting tool by itself.

Why Pre-Assessment is important to any VoIP or Video Deployment

2008-12-10T08:14:02-08:00

With any legacy data network the consideration for real-time applications was never really an issue since most data packet would be re-transmitted if they did not arrive via TCP. With the use of UDP to handle VoIP and Video packets the need to manage the packet integrity became a mandatory issue to ensure the that real-time applications like VoIP and video did not have packet loss, jitter or latency on any of these important packets.

By pre-assessing your legacy data network with a VoIP or video generated load across your network to measure how these new applications will perform would provide the network administrator the valuable information on the capabilities of their legacy data network to fully support real-time applications. As with any engineering task, an assessment of the conditions and network infrastructure is very typical for most deployments on new applications. Why is it that most for go the pre-assessment and just deploy and wonder why they have some many issues and specialists on site to resolve problems that could have been identified before the applications were deployed.

When you decide to deploy a new mission critical application the need to assess the performance of your network should be tablestakes in the successful deployment. To ensure that every new real-time application is handled correctly the need for pre-assessments should never be overlooked.

By pre-assessing your data networks you will ensure that all new applications have the appropriate bandwidth and packet performance to deliver the quality your end-users expect.

Yet another memo to the president from a startup guy

2008-12-07T22:24:45-08:00

With all the advice that our President-Elect is getting, I couldn't resist adding my favorite for his kind consideration. My request is shaped by what I see as an opportunity for America to retake the lead in telecom/datacom and dominate it for years to come.

Before I propose my idea, I wanted to take a shot at first figuring out how much you have to really spend on stimulating the economy. My guesstimate is that you'll need at least $1.1T/year of capital injection for the next couple of years to make up for what we have lost! Here is the un-scientific method I used to come up with this number:

As we all know, much of our economy in the past few years was driven by mortgage spending, military spending, and tax cuts. It is not easy to figure out how much money was really behind the mortgage market because of the multiplier effect (and the fact that we don't know the real decline in mortgage asset prices). So I took a short cut - According to Fannie Mae's numbers their ARM-based mortgage originations was over $750B in 2006 (this was as high as ~$900B in 2005, but came down to $400B in 2007 as the meltdown started). I took this ARM-based financing component as a proxy for the bad mortgages in the recent past, and therefore assumed that this source of funding will be non-existent under the current tight-credit conditions. As a result, the $750B+/year inflow of money from the ARM-based financing market is all but over. Note that I am only looking at the spending at the top of the mortgage food chain - there are a lot of multiplier effects that result from this - i.e. the loans result in new houses being built, which creates demand for home builders/contractors/home equipment/kitchen equipment/ garden equipment/realtors/finance companies/etc.etc. So the true loss to the GDP from the mortgage disaster could be much more. For the sake of simplicity, I am ignoring Freddie Mac.

The rest of the $1.1Trillion/year was made up of $200B/year in military spending and about $150B in tax cuts, both of which are slowly being clamped down. So we have to really make up for $1.1T+/year - Granted, my math is approximate - but I think it is in the ballpark of prviding a "baseline" to the minimum injection we need.

Clearly, this will become a huge debt burden if we invest in the wrong sectors. Furthermore, investments have to be made such that the resulting opportunities cannot be outsourced. One of the ways this can be done is by investing in technologies that are physically tied to this country. Also, we need to invest in sectors that will have a huge multiplier effect in creating jobs for multiple industries and across multiple regions within the US.

The creation of the Internet was a classic example of this - America pioneered the creation of the Internet by creating the ARPANET to interconnect our government/military and educational institutions, and as a result we reaped the rewards via high-tech growth in the 90's. We need something similar now. So here is the suggestion from my vantage point, and it will only cost a few billion and will have huge multiplier effects in multiple industries within the US.

Mr. President Elect, I request you to fund federal/state agencies and universities to deploy tele-presence voice-video infrastructure interconnected via high-speed networks. This has several benefits:

1. It will drive job growth in the telecom/datacom service industry in retooling networks for VoIP and Video readiness. This job growth will be broad-based across the entire countly.
2. It will drive the creation of more MPLS-capable networks, which drives the creation of jobs in the US service provider space
3. It will drive faster adoption of VoIP and Video in a business-to-business environment, which drives the creation of new business models in the service sector, and new startups that pursue these opportunities
4. It will drive new forms of government-to-people communication which will reduce wasteful spending and create new business opportunities (like how the Arpanet eventually led to e-commerce and B2B-commerce)
5. It will give certainty and confidence to VCs (who are sitting on hordes of cash) to invest in new/existing US-based startups to pursue opportunities in this space. The VCs will invest for opportunities that span the next 5-10 years, thus creating jobs in crucial hi-tech areas.
6. It will reduce the need for business travel and therefore help bring down our dependence on oil as well as reduce global warming
7. Most importantly, the build-out of such a US-based infrastructure will create and keep jobs in the US!

Thanks!

Praveen

It's Not MY Network!

2008-12-04T11:23:32-08:00

One of the biggest challenges faced by service providers after a new VoIP rollout is the expectation by the end enterprise user that the phone quality will be the same as it was with the more expensive land line, no matter WHAT is going on in his network.

Couple this with the infusion of "twenty-somethings" entering the work force and downloading bandwidth intensive Youtube videos while chatting in MySpace over lunchtime - or at times, during actual work time. Now you have a recipe for LAN congestion (or WAN congestion) which can lead to poor voice quality and customer complaints.

The picture gets even more complex in most enterprise networks, which have become a hodge podge of equipment made by different vendors, with assorted and sundry misconfigurations and inefficiencies created as no one vendor manages things end-to-end.

But what is the first thing an enterprise IT manager does when he gets call quality complaints? That's right - he calls his VoIP service provider and blames the problem on " This new fancy VoIP stuff". (I had one enterprise IT manager whom I was trying to interest in our solution tell me that VoIP gave him hives. )

So, what's a hard working VoIP provider to do? Call Packet Island - and get one of our time-saving, revenue-saving managed service solutions that allow you to remotely and easily pinpoint the problem, right down to the guy in the corner downloading movies on company time and chewing up all the bandwidth.

Welcome to Packet Island's New Blog - Reborn as the Packet Rag!

2008-12-01T16:58:22-08:00

Welcome to the newest, latest and greatest version of Packet Island's blog - The Packet Rag. Here, we will feature product news, company news, ideas for using our tools more effectively, the latest and greatest in problems we have helped our customers uncover, and technical information regarding Voice - video- data networks in general.

We want to invite you to become regular reader's of The Packet Rag - please subscribe to our feed so you will never miss a single post, meaning any new "network gremlins" will be easily slayable!