Video on a converged network

[Mike Souders]

It's been a year now and my network dept cannot get it to where I have clean video. We have plenty of bandwidth (Multiple T1's and T3"s) and brand new switches and routers (Cisco). There have been consultants in here from various companies and no smoking gun has been found. My thoughts are that our QOS policy is not correct. Thgey think otherwise. We are currently running Data and Voice (Cisco Skinny) together using VLAN's. There is a video VLAN setup as well but we still get horrible quality. Can someone make some suggestions, comments, etc. as to what I should look for to finally fix this problem???? We just started to buy Hi Def Tandbergs which are worthless if I can't do video over IP.

[kwerion]

Mike,

Take a look at "Implementing QoS Solutions for H.323 Video Conferencing over IP" http://cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk543/tk757/technologies_tech_note09186a0080094968.shtml#shoul d_voice

Lots of info, but should point you in the right direction. Make sure your IT group is looking at this from an end-to-end perspective. Common mistake is to focus only on the bandwidth constrained wide area links and ignore the LAN. But without proper QoS and buffer settings at the switches, you could still experience problems even though the WAN is setup properly.

Ken

[Mike Souders]

Our calls on the LAN are clean. It's when they hit the WAN that the quaility is atrocious.

[kwerion]

QoS should still be managed from switch port to switch port.

Does your video quality improve at lower bandwidths? What is your current QoS policy setting for vc?