When PBXs first hit the market, manufacturers told companies to buy one trunk for every four phones. Obviously too simplistic to apply across all vertical markets and companies, so the age of traffic studies was born. It was all about busy hours and trying to pick the right timeframe to run the studies.

Since those days, the introduction of technologies such as cellphones, texting, VoIP, SIP and web collaboration have rewritten the world of network performance management. Today, you have the option to be proactive and make true engineering decisions based on your company’s unique collaboration network. No longer do you have to sit back and wait for periodic traffic studies or let your telecom provider tell you how much capacity you need. Empower yourself and your organization with the right methodologies and tools!

This blog is not meant to have all the answers, but hopefully it will get you moving and thinking to transform your business processes for network performance monitoring and capacity planning.
Visibility is everyone’s favorite marketing term these days. But look past the fluff and it is real. You do need (and can have) complete visibility to your voice network data. You need to have the data at your fingertips every day to optimize your network performance. How can you optimize anything if you don’t have visibility into real-time and historical usage trends? Reading this now, can you answer these questions:

• Is my network running at 35% utilization, 95% utilization or somewhere in between?
• Have any calls been blocked or dropped today?
• What is the maximum number of concurrent call paths this month?

Trend analysis and data decomposition can expose the root cause of current and impending service issues along with providing the basis for accurate capacity planning and network design.

Capacity Planning
As you understand your usage trends and the data decomposition of valid versus failed or fraudulent calls, you can understand if you are paying for capacity that is not servicing valid calls. You are at risk of extreme oversubscription. And, yes, that translates directly to money right down the drain. Given that your network most likely started with extra capacity and now add in all the new communication technologies, it is very likely that your existing network has excessive capacity. How many times recently have you sent a text instead of picking up a phone? Don’t let some SIP provider convince you that you need to spend way too much for capacity you don’t need. Use your own historical data and a good analytical tool to find your own answers.

Peak Percent Utilization
To dig into your capacity utilization, start by looking into peak percent utilization. Whether PRI or SIP circuits, do you know the peak percent utilization for today, or this month or the past 12 months? Like this example, maybe you have some facilities that are hitting 100% and may be blocking calls but most of your network facilities have a lot of excess capacity that is not being used.

This high-level view has value, but additional insight is gained by drilling into detail. You will want to be able to see the utilization by hour trending. Quickly note any trends or aberrations in activity that may account for elevated peak utilization. Or confirm if your current capacity is too much or not enough. In the example below, the peak capacity consistently remained around 50-60% with the exception of the 100% spike on December 6. Was that spike driven by the business (a marketing campaign or service outage to generate calls) or maybe an inbound hacking attempt? If not “real”, this could indicate a potential opportunity for savings by decreasing channel capacity.

Concurrent Call Paths
Knowing your network’s channel usage is critical data for contract negotiation and management of both equipment and network service providers. By seeing your usage trends and capacity thresholds, you can decide if flat rate, burstable or a blend of both is optimal for your unique network and budget. To begin to understand how you can eliminate over-subscription to drive down service provider costs and system maintenance fees, let’s look at concurrent call paths (CCP) analytics. The first chart below illustrates the maximum channels per day for one network that is fairly consistent around 20 channels with some obvious spikes. Maybe a blend of flat rate with burstable increases for days if the spikes of usage are driven by business activities is the best plan in this scenario.

The second example is much less consistent. In many cases, it is inbound hacking call attempts with hundreds or thousands of very short calls that drive the spikes you may see in CCP like the August 16 spike below. Again, you would want to drill down to the details to determine what is behind the abnormal behavior.

Networks are dynamic. To transform your network management and create optimum resourcing designs and strategies, you need visibility into your current and historical usage, performance and capacity metrics. Check back again soon for the next post on troubleshooting some of those abnormal call spikes.

Clearly See Your Voice Network Activity and Performance with Optic
Optic for Voice Networks™ will give you a clear view into your network’s usage, trending and performance, both from high level trending dashboards to the ability to search for specific calls and see detailed metrics. Visibility will help you improve caller experience, mitigate service risks and improve the cost performance of your voice network. Contact us today to learn more about proactively monitoring your voice network and gaining seamless visibility across your entire voice network activity and performance.