Audio-Video quality issue

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Voice and Video quality for Office Communicator 2007 R2 and Live Meeting 2007 depend mainly on the condition and quality of the network. Under challenging situation we may experience following problems…

Tinny audio     Occurs when the person you are talking to sounds unnatural and may have a higher pitch than expected.

Loss of words     Occurs when portions of the conversation are lost.

Choppy video     Occurs when the video image does not have a smooth motion.

Long delay     Occurs when there is a long delay between when one person talks and the other person hears the audio.

These issues may occur due to LAN congestion, Wireless LAN interference, Faulty LAN cabling or connection, or hardware configuration.

In order to handle these quality issues we used all traditional methods like moving closer to access points, closing other network applications on system etc.

We used Monitoring server to get a detailed view of network quality in terms of packet loss, jitter, frame loss, and delay throughout our VoIP deployment. And if required we configured QoS to prioritize the audio-video traffic.

Role of Call Admission Control (CAC)

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Audio-Video communications are sensitive to the networks. CAC helps to prevent a poor Quality of Experience (QoE) for users on congested networks by determining whether to allow real-time communications sessions to be established, based on available network bandwidth. Call admission control also provides an alternative route for calls when the preferred route does not have the required bandwidth.

Call Admission Control is also known as WAN Bandwidth Management.

As a person managing unified communications infrastructure for a large enterprise, I know the pain caused by the voice quality issue. I am pretty much sure that a proper implementation of CAC is going to provide required relief.

 Few points about compatibility

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·         CAC can be enabled only for Microsoft Lync Server 2010 users.

·         CAC cannot be enabled for previous version of Microsoft Lync clients.

·         CAC policy check is performed by the called party, so when a user running Lync Server 2010 calls an endpoint running an earlier version, CAC cannot be performed.

By

Ram K Ojha