While certain live events have been cancelled amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, many of them have been replaced with virtual counterparts that have taken place via videoconference. Some of these events have had hundreds or even thousands of participants. With such numbers, how do videoconferencing systems cope with the traffic load and processing power required?

In this article, we take a look at the concepts involved with the scaling of videoconferencing for large numbers of participants. We also examine some best practices to keep in mind that will help ensure the quality of the end user experience.

For small voice networks with only a few dozen phones that exist on a single site, design considerations for digital signal processors (DSPs) will probably not keep you up at night. In fact, you may never have to think about them at all! But for larger multi-site networks, the placement of your DSP resources is important, since when not placed appropriately they could interfere with conferencing performance. In this article, we outline what you need to know to design your network so DSPs work the most efficiently for you.

Over time, enterprises grow, technological requirements increase, and ICT (information and communications technology) infrastructure becomes more complex. This complexity adds administrative overhead, can result in an inconsistency of system performance, and increases the probability of downtime due to human error.

One way to manage this complexity is to use the concept of configuration management (CM). In this article, we describe configuration management and show you how it can help streamline your VoIP, data, and ICT infrastructure lifecycle as a whole.

Most modern IP phones today support Power over Ethernet (PoE), an almost magical technology that powers your IP phone via the same Ethernet cable that connects it to the network. While it may seem simple on the surface, PoE technology is actually quite sophisticated, and is worth understanding when making choices involving network design or IP telephony hardware.

Telephony solutions come in all shapes and sizes and can be customized to suit the specific needs of each individual business. But with so many choices, it can be confusing for customers to distinguish between the various options available. This is no less the case when it comes to choosing a VoIP service.

Jitter is one of the most common causes of substandard voice communications over IP networks. This article provides an overview of jitter and how it influences voice applications, as well as methods for resolving it on your networks.

In today's virtual world, telecom and network services have come a long way, from being offered using locally installed, standalone monolithic servers to ethereal entities residing in the cloud. This evolution has touched every part of network service provisioning, and one of the most fascinating facets of this trend is that the network infrastructure itself can be virtualized.

Network function virtualization (NFV) is a network architecture philosophy that virtualizes the network infrastructure. In this article, we take a look at what NFV is, how it works, how it fits in with other virtualization technologies, and how it can be of benefit for enterprise networks.

Redundancy and scalability are important for VoIP systems. Virtualization makes both of these easier, less costly, and more efficient. Coupled with cloud services, virtualization has revolutionized how network services are provided, and in particular, how VoIP deployment is executed.

In this article, we explain what virtualization is, the trends governing its newest technologies, and how all of this can be leveraged for use with VoIP services.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is changing the way networks are managed and designed. In this article, we take a look at how an SDN approach can be of great benefit to VoIP and video telephony deployments in particular.

A major challenge inherent in designing and maintaining an enterprise network is the administration costs. Software-defined networking (SDN) can dramatically reduce both the hard costs (money) and soft costs (time) of managing a network. Although this tends to be the most compelling argument in favor of using SDN, it in fact offers may more advantages than this. In this article, we introduce SDN and examine some of its key benefits.