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Voice over IP using Avaya G700 Media Gateways involves components from both the data world and the voice world. Historically, these have been markedly different worlds, with distinct network designs and protocols, implementation strategies, and support organizations.
Traditional circuit-switched voice networks dedicated their entire bandwidth to voice transmission, so signal delay was rarely an issue. They were designed to ensure "five nines" -- 99.999% -- reliability to support such crucial communications as 911 calls. Interactive voice traffic is sensitive to jitter and delay, but can tolerate a degree of signal loss.
Packet-switched data networks, on the other hand, are less sensitive to delay and jitter problems but cannot tolerate information loss. Data network design has focused on reliable, accurate data transmission over unreliable media, regardless of delay. Network bandwidth is shared, so congestion and delay are common but do not impair data.
Within a converged network, the factors that affect the quality of data transmission are different from those that affect voice transmission. Data is generally not degraded by delay, but voice quality suffers with even small degrees of signal delay. Packet losses can corrupt a computer file, but voice tolerates some degree of packet loss.
Implementing G700s with VoIP technology requires a data network that can identify and transmit voice packets with minimal delay, giving them priority over data packets. Some high performance data networks may not be able to support voice transmission without alterations or improvements.
For more information on Quality of Service issues, see "Administration for Network Connectivity for Avaya MultiVantageTM Software, 555-233-504".
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