| Citrix' Ponderings On VOIP |
| Tuesday, 21 November 2006 by Michel Roth | |||
|
"There are several characteristics that need to be addressed in a VoIP solution that are not quite there today. For one thing, voice quality may be an issue. In an environment where telephony is mission critical such as a call center, voice quality must be commercial grade and it must be nearly as reliable as the regular PSTN quality we are so accustomed to today. The only way to get this type of service is to have a very good network in place with QoS mechanisms deployed to ensure a high level of voice quality or at least an alerting system that signals when quality degrades. This is at odds with one of the key use cases that some customers talk about when wanting to deploy VoIP Softphones over ICA. What they are sometimes asking for is WAN or internet connectivity to a back end VoIP infrastructure without having to deploy Softphones to unmanaged client devices in users' homes or across the internet. In this case, the Softphone would be published on Presentation Server and the audio input and output would be remoted to the ICA client. The situation is less than ideal for commercial grade quality. The best quality that users would hope to expect in this scenario is something akin to Skype which is hit or miss depending on the connection. So, firewall traversal and WAN/internet connectivity are really in conflict with the requirement for excellent voice quality in commercial grade operations. We may be able to reach commercial grade quality on a LAN with some work but the applicability may be limited." Read the entire article here.
Show/Hide comment form
 |
|||
