throttle bandwidth or buy more?

[upclose]

As our company has grown we've been faced with some issues with network congestion. It's usually not a huge deal, but there are times when VoIP calls and video conferencing are affected. We're looking at the options to fix this problem and have decided we either need to pay for more bandwidth or install some kind of bandwidth throttling to keep VoIP and video running smoothly. Throttling would probably be the more affordable solution in the long term, assuming it works. With that said, can you give some suggestions as to what products we should consider?

[phylo]

How long do you mean by long term? Some solutions are expensive. And some are free, but don't work that well. I've heard positive things about netequalizer, riverbed and also packeteer. All supposidly work well. Netequalizer is the less expensive of the three.

[JamesSmith]

Introduce policies on your network to give priority at the router level to voice traffic and reduce priority for browsing the net. Make sure you're blocking Instant Message services and preventing P2P access. Try reducing the quality of the VOIP calls. A low quality VOIP call is often very good quality compared to an ordinary copper to copper phone line call.

If after all that you still need more bandwidth, make half your staff redundant, use the savings to automate their jobs, they won't be sucking up your bandwidth making their VOIP calls and downloading youtube clips while at the jobcenter.

[phylo]

Yes, you can do that kind of stuff with Netequalizer and the others. VoIP and video both can be prioritized to make sure they have the bandwidth they need.

[Craig B]

Like James has said, your after prioritising your VoIP and Video conferencing traffic. The buzz word your looking for is QoS (Quality of Service). Most routers can do this, although if your not sure about the technicalities then the Dryatek routers can configure QoS from a fairly simple web interface. Then you might pick VoIP and Video Conferencing to be high priority, email might be low priority (Most people don't mind if an email is delayed by a few seconds, but a voice call will be unusable with the same delay).

[upclose]

Thanks for the suggestions.

[niiker345]

Originally Posted by Craig B

Like James has said, your after prioritising your VoIP and Video conferencing traffic. The buzz word your looking for is QoS (Quality of Service). Most routers can do this, although if your not sure about the technicalities then the Dryatek routers can configure QoS from a fairly simple web interface. Then you might pick VoIP and Video Conferencing to be high priority, email might be low priority (Most people don't mind if an email is delayed by a few seconds, but a voice call will be unusable with the same delay).

best way to go.