Relief From VoIP Headaches

Edgewater Networks Helps Ensure The Quality Of IP Communications

VoIP is a great solution for real-time communications—provided you have a system configured to properly monitor, secure, and allocate your voice and video data. Santa Clara, Calif.,-based Edgewater Networks understands this caveat. The company has been specializing in making VoIP-based communications easy to set up since 2002, and its heritage descends from a virtual who’s who of companies that pioneered this space, including Cisco, Siemens, Nokia, and First Virtual Communications.

“The management team has a lot of experience in TDM (time-division multiplexing) and packet-based networking of voice and video,” says Dave Martin, vice president of marketing at Edgewater Networks (www.edgewaternetworks.com). “We were founded on the belief that real-time communications over IP networks were going to be the next big thing in networking, and IT operators and service providers faced challenges in rolling them out.”

Secure & Reliable Real-Time Communications

Martin explains that the primary applications that tend to cause the most trouble for IT departments are converged networks, videoconferencing over IP, hosted voice and video over IP, connecting an existing PBX via SIP trunking, and secure access for remote employees working either in home or branch offices of an organization. “There are so many issues with security, quality of service (QoS), ongoing maintenance, and troubleshooting that we wanted to create solutions that would optimize real-time communications over IP networks and provide security and reliability for our customers,” Martin says.
According to Martin, Edgewater’s value lies in its ability to simplify the setup and monitoring of real-time applications, which in turn helps its customers reduce their costs and deliver a best-of-breed end-user experience when converging voice and video data with conventional data. “If you’re a service provider, we can reduce the TCO for delivering managed voice and video services and reduce customer churn because the service will work more reliably. If you’re an IT administrator, we can simplify branch office connectivity for you and provide a better experience for users of these applications,” Martin says.

Modular & Synergistic Solutions

Edgewater Networks takes a modular approach with its solutions. Each product line works well individually and often is all an enterprise needs. Combined, however, Edgewater’s product lines work in synergy to provide the sort of results that make VoIP a near no-brainer.

For example, Edgewater offers its EdgeMarc Network Services Gateways as access devices that are deployed as part of a network infrastructure. “Enterprise IT use [the EdgeMarcs] for branch office or office connectivity or secure remote access for their road warriors or remote workers who need secure connectivity into the enterprise for voice and video,” Martin says. The EdgeMarc product line is so broad that it scales to fit everything from a SOHO environment all the way up to a large enterprise.


Edgewater also offers the EdgeView, a hardware-based VoIP support system that works as an integrated VoIP quality probe, monitoring and troubleshooting the entire VoIP network. “When someone places a call using an IP [phone], the EdgeView generates statistics around the audio quality that user experiences during that call,” says Martin. “If that user has a bad experience, the EdgeView helps to isolate where you might have network impairments within your distributed enterprise that are affecting the call quality.”

The EdgeView typically is deployed in a network operations center or the primary data center, where it can monitor the entire network, while EdgeMarc routers are more often used as gateways to branch offices or remote locations. Either product line offers excellent functionality and seamless integration with existing VoIP networks, but the two really shine when they are used together. “If you have a user who tells you he had a [poor-quality] call an hour ago, it’s hard to start to figure out what is going on, given the distributed nature of IT networks,” says Martin. “The EdgeView provides you with visibility into the quality of your VoIP application. You can take problem resolution times from hours down to minutes because you are now able to monitor call quality at all different points of your network.”

Prioritizing The Right Data

Perhaps the most important thing a VoIP solution can do is to ensure that voice and video traffic gets priority over other traffic in order to maintain end-user call standards. With real-time communications, Martin says, “If you don’t have QoS built into the network, you’ll find that other data traffic can delay voice or video packets, which causes obvious problems for the person making the call.”

Edgewater’s EdgeMarc appliances are protocol-aware, which enables them to determine which devices need priority treatment should congestion occur within the network. “The EdgeMarc will automatically place them in the priority queue for the network operator or service provider, so it is not required to set up a complex access list or identify all the end points by IP address and so forth,” says Martin. “Because it is voice-aware, it can use that intelligence to simplify the prioritization and traffic shaping that has to happen.”

Martin says that the EdgeMarc is so effective in this regard that many service providers use the devices even when they do not own the actual infrastructure. “They will drop an EdgeMarc appliance behind someone else’s copper and essentially use it as a demarcation point for the service and provide the needed quality of service over that access point,” Martin says.

Making VoIP Seamless

In addition to prioritizing voice and video data, Edgewater’s products give users the ability to maintain stringent security and high availability standards in a range of scenarios. “If you’re offering a hosted service and the access point goes down, our devices can provide call control so that your employees and your customers continue to get voice services,” says Martin. “Or if you’re an enterprise with your own PBX connecting to a SIP trunk provider, we can provide the proper security and QoS and then help ensure interoperability between the service providers, SIP trunking network, and the PBX itself.”

Edgewater’s EdgeConnect managed power over Ethernet switches are optimized for converged networking environments such as a hybrid PBX/VoIP environment just described and can provide inline power to IP phones, as well. “You can see we’ve created another networking solution that stands alone in its own right, but when you combine it [with our other solutions], you really leverage all the capabilities that we have towards reducing TCO and resolving problems quickly,” says Martin.