Even best-of-breed VoIP products will not give your customers pristine audio quality, unless the network uses the right router. Most consumer routers, even if they claim to offer QOS, may not be intelligent enough to auto-detect and correctly handle VoIP calls and give these first priority over other bandwidth-hungry network traffic.

Many find out the hard way that VoIP quality varies a lot and does not always produce pristine calls, mostly due to the available bandwidth not being effectively managed to ensure VoIP call quality. For example, a sync triggered for a user’s Dropbox account could create a spike in bandwidth usage and cause packet drops on existing VoIP calls. In a data-driven world, each process tries to do its transaction as fast as possible with no regard to other critical processes; and this is precisely what the VoIP QOS feature needs to manage.

QoS partly solves the problem by prioritizing VoIP traffic, but a router also needs to be able to perform proactive traffic shaping. Consumer routers are very limited in their QoS functionality, while enterprise routers can get quite complicated in their QoS setup. Often times extensive network knowledge about multiple protocols and QoS terminology is needed to set it up correctly.

Intelligent VoIP QoS

DrayTek routers have made it very easy to configure VoIP QoS and do not require extensive VoIP QoS expertise. Setup requires a single-checkbox with which the router is able to automatically detect VoIP calls (both SIP signalling and RTP media); and dynamically throttle other traffic, so there is always bandwidth for the next two calls. This results in an extremely responsive and proactive traffic shaping mechanism to ensure pristine audio quality.

DrayTek’s intelligent VoIP QoS design resolves 98% of common QoS issues, vastly improving customer experience by eliminating jittery audio and bad call quality.

VoIP Diagnostics

The newly added VoIP diagnostics let you drill down and check call quality metrics such as jitter, delay, packet loss and MOS scores, for both ongoing and historic calls.

Redundancy Guaranteed Internet Access

DrayTek also helps you maximize your network bandwidth by combining multiple DSL connections with it’s multi-WAN load-balancing feature. So you can enable more concurrent calls as your business grows. And with multiple WANs providing redundancy guaranteed Internet access, your phones will always stay connected.

Centralized Network Management

DrayTek’s Private Cloud Auto Configuration and Remote Management tool, the ACS-SI, has been designed keeping MSPs in mind. The software lets MSPs easily monitor hundreds of deployed customer routers from one central interface and generate trouble tickets in your internal case management software. Draytek provides early warning for most router’s health parameters to preempt customer problems. You can also monitor overall bandwidth, VoIP Quality and even session count to detect a possible security breach at your customer site. We are now offering our partners access to our hosted version of the ACS to simplify deployment further.

Overall, DrayTek is an incredible tool for any MSP or Reseller getting into Managed Services or Managed Routers.

By Mrunmayee Athawalé