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How do you manage enterprise video communications performance?

Enterprise video performance is vulnerable to latency and packet loss. Organizations must address three key areas in video communications to prevent issues that could impede performance.

"Good enough" video performance is a relative term. For real-time enterprise video communications, some adjustments need to be made. Three key things affect video performance: user devices, network connections and video infrastructure.

Devices

Processing video properly requires modern devices, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, PCs and video room systems. Anything released in the past two or three years should be good enough for most enterprise video communications needs. If you need to cater to older devices, test their performance separately -- current-day requirements may burden their CPU too much.

Network

Real-time enterprise video communications are sensitive to network conditions. Make sure the network in your offices works well by reducing packet loss and properly configuring switches and routers against bufferbloat, which is high latency caused by network equipment buffering too much data.

You should also check your connection from the office to the public internet, and consider the capacity needed for video communications across the office. Make sure user datagram protocol communications toward the internet isn't blocked, as this will decrease video performance and quality.

Infrastructure

If you deliver your enterprise video communications through a cloud provider, check and validate how the provider's infrastructure communicates with the devices in your office. Many cloud providers will have points-of-presence spread around the world. You'll want these points to be as close as possible to your offices.

While on-premises infrastructure is decreasing in popularity, it is still out there in most enterprises. When deploying on-premises video, you will need to manage and monitor your network's performance, as well as the connections between your office locations, taking into account the bandwidth available between every office pair.

Do you have a question for Tsahi Levent-Levi or any other experts? Ask your enterprise-specific questions today! (All questions are treated anonymously.)

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