A First Look at Media Conferencing Traffic in the Global Enterprise

Many enterprise networks have grown far beyond a single large site to span tens to hundreds of branch offices across the globe, each connected over VPNs or leased lines. With the emergence of the globallyconnected enterprise and the trend towards enterprise all-IP convergence, including transitioning the enterprise PBX to VoIP servers, IP-based audio/video conferencing for telepresence has challenged the notion that bandwidth is abundant in the enterprise. We take a first look at media conferencing traffic in the global enterprise and, by instrumenting measurement of call quality and network statistics, we quantify the impact on call quality for a range of factors in the enterprise, such as wired vs. wireless access, intervs. intrabranch office communication, QoS mechanisms like VLAN tagging and DiffServ DSCP marking, and VPN vs. public Internet access.