Unified communications (UC) and professional audiovisual (AV) systems have historically been two distinct and separate disciplines with little overlap. Over the past decade, however, the barrier between these two has steadily been crumbling. UC and AV are rapidly converging, and AV systems are increasingly relying on IP networks.

This convergence has led to the introduction of new networking requirements and design approaches, such as AVLANs and AVIoT, which involve exciting new capabilities as well as design challenges.

In this article, we delve deeper into this convergence story, helping you to better understand the benefits and intricacies this evolution represents for both network engineers and AV integrators.

Modern enterprise networks are becoming increasingly complex, posing significant challenges in terms of scalability and segmentation. This is seen especially within traditional layer 2 architectures. To address these limitations, technologies like Virtual eXtensible LAN (VXLAN) have emerged, offering a scalable and flexible solution to extend layer 2 networks over layer 3 infrastructure.

As VoIP and UC technologies continue to leverage virtualized and cloud infrastructures, understanding technologies like VXLAN becomes essential for those deploying such applications. In this article, we examine what VXLAN is and how it can help enable modern VoIP and UC deployments.

By Brian Van Meter at Grandstream

As technology continues to advance, networks within offices, hotels, education spaces and other verticals have grown more complex. Phones, computers, IoT devices, smart technology and more can all be simultaneously running across a deployment’s Local Area Network (LAN). This can lead to issues with security, network organization, and scalability.

As a result of these roadblocks, Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) have become an increasingly popular feature that can help partition physical networks into virtually manageable ones. Within this blog post, we’ll give you an introduction to building VLANs with Grandstream’s GWN layer 2+ switches.