Our focus is on organizations that deploy and troubleshoot voice over IP (VoIP) networks. These groups may be professional services or pre- and post-sales engineering groups. A big problem with VoIP is the quality of calls, which is most affected by convergence with existing data network traffic. In most scenarios, the data network will require tuning in order to achieve acceptable quality for voice traffic. When changes are made to the network, network administrators will need a way to ensure that they will continue to get the same or better quality.

This paper describes practical steps for building an assessment of whether a data network is ready for VoIP. Our software, Chariot, is designed so that personnel with little training and no additional VoIP equip- ment can quickly make useful VoIP-readiness assessments.