What is SIP Trunking?
SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) Trunking is a digital way of making and receiving phone calls and other communications over an internet connection. The term trunking refers to the method of consolidating multiple communication channels into one singular connection. SIP Trunks provide VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) connectivity between on-premise phone systems to the PSTN, which allows for the efficient use of resources and connection to the telephone network.
Working with a trusted SIP provider like Fuse 2 ensures your VoIP infrastructure is built with security at its core, not as an afterthought.
What Real-Time VoIP Monitoring Means
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is an effective substitute for traditional landlines, enabling flexible communication between businesses, which heavily relies on your network performance. Continuous tracking and ensuring that your network performance is smooth, clear and reliable is called Real-Time VoIP monitoring. By doing this, organisations can rapidly identify and resolve problems before they impact end users.
VoIP monitoring typically includes analysing metrics such as:
- Call latency: how long it takes for voice packets to travel across the network.
- Jitter: Audio that’s choppy caused by differences in packet arrival timings.
- Packet loss: when packets of audio fail to arrive at the receiver.
It’s really important to understand the difference between monitoring these metrics and just waiting for complaints to happen. By following these metrics, you’ll be able to notice issues before they appear and preserve user experience as opposed to vice versa where users have already experienced these issues and are then obliged to reach out for help.
Why Monitoring Matters More Than Ever
Today, approximately 40-44% of employees work remotely or in a hybrid model. Disregarding the lockdown, we are experiencing the highest volume of people working from home ever.
With this in mind, it’s important to recognise how imperative it is that employees have seamless communication, as they rely on online communication much more than office workers. If some of the workforce is experiencing network issues affecting their online communication, this will heavily affect productivity, which may put the brand’s reputation at risk. Extensive challenges with call quality, for example, network downtime, may result in missed sales calls and failed support lines, directly affecting revenue.
Common Issues Monitoring Can Catch Early
Jitter
Telecommunication traffic travels in data packets. Due to network congestion, the data packets can arrive at the recipient in different orders, resulting in sentences sounding scrambled with words in different orders.
Latency
The time delay between sending a message from your phone to your friend’s phone. Network latency is the same thing, except it’s specifically for internet actions, and people normally just call it ‘lag’.
Packet Loss
The failure of data packets reaching their destination is called ‘packet loss’. Usually, this is caused by network equipment dropping, ignoring, misdelivering, or discarding packets. This can lead to dropped calls or missing words.
Bandwidth saturation
Once you’ve reached bandwidth saturation, it’s because you’ve been trying to push more data through your connection than it was designed to take. This results in dropped connections, buffering videos or poor quality.
Hardware/config errors
This refers to the physical piece of equipment that is essential for carrying your signal, which has malfunctioned and failed. If this happens, the SIP trunk can no longer register with your phone service provider, and all incoming and outgoing calls will drop immediately.
The Role of Real-Time Alerts
VoIP is a real-time service, so time-sensitive alerts are fundamental to telecoms. With real-time alerts, IT teams will be immediately notified if a critical metric passes a bad threshold. Without these alerts, you’d only find out about these issues if your manager is alerted that all phones are down, a customer complains, or you check the report from the day before. However, with real-time alerts, your IT team will be able to identify and solve the issue before any users notice something’s wrong, protecting your brand image.
For example, say your business has two internet phone lines, line 1 (the primary phone line) and line 2 (the backup). Line 1 has an alert to say that too many packets are getting lost. The system immediately sends a text to the IT team to let them know that Line 1 is broken. However, while the IT team is reading this message, the system has already switched all calls to Line 2. The system now sends another message to the IT team to inform them that all calls have been switched to Line 2 and that everything is functioning properly, but Line 1 needs to be fixed.
Benefits of Real-Time Monitoring & Alerts
Every business regardless of size, can benefit from monitoring its network in real-time. These benefits include:
Minimised downtime and lost revenue
Businesses will be able to identify problems before they even occur, preventing costly disruptions and avoiding brand-sensitive downtime. With real-time monitoring, you can track energy use, equipment performance, and resource usage in real time to cut waste and ensure maintenance.
Protect customer experience and brand reputation
With the immediate detection of system failures, IT teams can prevent downtime and therefore prevent minor disruptions from becoming major complaints.
Support remote/hybrid teams more effectively
Since real-time monitoring immediately detects system failures, the IT team can find solutions to these problems before the remote workers report them. It also provides objective data on remote worker results and workload, ensuring that employees are measured by productivity instead of time spent, mitigating burnout.
Give IT visibility + control without guesswork
As mentioned, it allows for IT to fix problems before they’ve been reported. It also correlates logs to pinpoint the exact failing module, so IT doesn’t need to manually investigate the system.
Compliance & audit readiness (track call logs performance history)
Real-time monitoring helps with compliance and audit readiness by utilising continuous, automated adherence to laws. Alerts can flag policy violations when they occur, which allows for instant fixes and liability.
Best Practices for Setting Up VoIP Monitoring & Alerts
Telecommunication traffic is sensitive to network instability, meaning that VoIP monitoring is critical. Here are the best practices for setting up VoIP monitoring and alerts:
Choosing a VoIP-Specific Monitoring Solution
Generic network tools usually miss the SIP signalling disruptions and spikes in traffic; you should therefore use a tool that understands SIP and RTP.
At Fuse 2, we own our own network and don’t rely on third parties. We have a professional, dedicated team that is ready at all times to solve any issues our customers experience, in case they come across any problems.
Establish key thresholds
Your telecom metrics should be based on the Mean Opinion Score (MOS), which is a scale of 1-5 of call quality. An alert should be sent if any of the metrics drop below 4.0.
- Latency: < 150 ms
- Jitter: < 30 ms
- Packet loss: < 1%
Set up Alert Escalation
- Mitigate “alert storms” by arranging levels of escalation based on the severity and duration of the issues.
- Level 1 (immediate) – Alert the network team via Teams if jitter exceeds 30ms for more than 2 minutes.
- Level 2 (15 minutes unresolved) – Message the IT Lead, indicating a hardware bottleneck or ISP routing issue.
- Level 3 (30 minutes / Total Outage) – Email management and trigger an automated status page update for employees. This makes employees aware and reduces incoming tickets.
Test alerts regularly to avoid “false alarm fatigue” – If your system alerts the whole team every single time a large file is downloaded, your team will start to ignore it. So here are some ways to avoid that from happening:
Synthetic Testing
You can configure your tool to send a “dummy” SIP call every couple of minutes. This way, you can ensure that the monitoring is still active even when no one is on the phone.
The “3-Check” Rule
A Level 1 alert should only be triggered if the threshold has been breached in three consecutive polls. This filters out momentary network spikes that self-correct.
Integrate monitoring into wider IT/network management strategy
This allows you to monitor VoIP and your network together in one system. You’ll be able to correlate the data with your network and decipher the root cause of issues.
Short Case Study
A well-known logistics company (who can not be named due to legal reasons) are a customer of Fuse 2 and was experiencing severe bandwidth issues with their previous provider, a third-party reseller. Their previous provider was unable to identify the cause of the bandwidth oversaturation due to their having limited visibility of the network on which they were hosting their services.
That’s when Fuse 2 came along! With full visibility of our independent network, our engineers could easily identify that bandwidth was being taken up by unnecessary operations. By migrating the customer onto a stronger network with more dedicated bandwidth for voice, the jitter and packet loss they were once experiencing were reduced to almost nothing! Through a series of intricate VoIP monitoring integrations, engineers could quickly identify peak periods of bandwidth use and could also provide logical workarounds to mitigate these problems.
