There are good reasons for banks to embrace voice over IP. It aids multi-media applications, facilitates channel integration, allows for system-wide software upgrades and could even make offshoring easier.
But there are problems. Top among these is the quality of the voice on a converged network, a place jam-packed with services vying for the same bandwidth. When it comes to VoIP, what this can create are conversations in digital staccato, where callers must wait several moments to be heard, or when "packet drops" actually create holes in the conversation; not only can this quickly annoy employees, it can frustrate customers as well.
"The quality is simply not good enough to handle calls of the utmost importance. Such calls include customer service calls, client calls, and calls where time is limited," writes Ariana-Michele Moore, an analyst at Celent Communications. "Many banks are cognizant of this performance problem and like other businesses have implemented VoIP only for their internal applications or calls coming into the branch. They will wait before risking mission- or business-critical functions, like customer service. ...Over the next two years we expect many of the kinks to be worked out and performance to improve substantially. Therefore, we expect VoIP adoption to be strong at banks in general over the next year or so; however, within the call center, we expect that it will be a year or two before banks begin to consider the technology."
One possible way industry players may work out those kinks is to establish so-called quality of service classes, which will allow banks to rank which activities should get priority on a network. This way a bank can ensure that voice applications on a converged network aren't degraded when less time-sensitive applications such as email, Web traffic or database synchronization, want to use the network.
Eileen Heggarty, director of solutions marketing at Netscout Systems, which offers QoS assessments, says most banks define four to six classes for simplicity's sake. But setting these ranking can be a very political issue within banks, since every head of a department wants their applications to get top priority.
The first step in the QoS assessment, she says, is an audit of the existing system-what systems are being used, who is using them and how much bandwidth is being eaten. "There are so many surprising findings," she says, from rogue programs and viruses, to voice applications being given the lowest priority on the network, to misconfigured routers that allow database traffic to eat 10 percent of bandwidth. "At one bank we turned on the QoS visibility and we saw that every application at the bank had been given top priority along with voice." The problem with that, of course, is if everything is a priority, nothing is. "The IT executive just laughed in disbelief."
UMB Bank, a bank holding company based in Kansas City, opted for a network audit using Netscout's nGenius Performance Management System before redesigning its network to accommodate the rollout of VoIP. Officials needed to ensure that business applications did not degrade as the VoIP services rolled out over time, and to do this they needed to know what applications were running on their network and how much bandwidth was being used.
"UMB brought in the tool to baseline the network," says Heggarty. "It was like cleaning out the closets in the spring. They were cleaning up network misuse."
The audit covered the existing network, both at the data center level and at the more than 150 branches. The company has about 3,500 employees. Audit results revealed the top users and the bandwidth utilization, as well as which applications were being used most. This information was monitored and displayed on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, so the bank's IT department could determine precisely where they needed to make adjustments to accommodate the volume expected once VoIP was added.
For instance, the tool showed the IT staff that the PCs were being reimaged in real-time and they were hitting the wrong server. When the IT staff interrupted the process, and arranged for it to be rescheduled to later at night, the WAN segment to the branch office became available for regular banking functions like VoIP.
At the same time UMB Bank was auditing its systems and rolling out its VoIP initiative, it was also initiating a new QoS policy to give voice priority delivery, while customer-facing and back-office applications would be assigned lesser QoS classes. nGenius "is a very valuable tool from the engineering perspective because we can look and see what the current traffic situations are and then model what a new application's impact may be to the network and how to design that particular circuit accordingly," says Bill Taylor, UMB's manager of network services.
