ThinkTel Network Assessment for UC Deployment Case Study

Find out how ThinkTel, a provider of advanced hosted, and on-premises, voice, video, conferencing, and data solutions for the Enterprise, Carrier and SMB markets throughout Canada, leverages Obkio’s Network Performance Monitoring solution to perform a network assessment of clients’ network capability to support the specific requirements of Real Time Media and deploy a Unified Communication solution with confidence (Microsoft Teams via Direct Routing, Skype for Business).

ThinkTel, a division of Distributel Communications Ltd., is a provider of advanced hosted, and on-premises, voice, video, conferencing, and data solutions for the Enterprise, Carrier, and SMB markets throughout Canada.

With over 15 years of experience delivering SIP-based telecommunication services, ThinkTel is one of the longest operating and most experienced business solution providers in the market, with a carrier network footprint covering over 1,200 cities across Canada. They address a wide variety of business challenges, with proven results in cost reduction and productivity enhancements.

ThinkTel strives to help small, medium, and enterprise business organizations across Canada replace their outdated, legacy telecom systems with more efficient cloud-based hosted communication systems.

In order to be successful, service providers like ThinkTel understand that it is important to complete a readiness assessment of a clients’ network infrastructure for the specific Real Time Media workloads incurred by these new services. It is crucial to complete this step beforehand to mitigate the risks; too many companies are spending large amounts of money and time on a Unified Communications deployment that does not provide the voice or video experience that is expected.

To prepare their clients for these new services, and deliver a seamless technology adoption experience, the ThinkTel team knew they needed to perform a network assessment to determine the capacity of a company’s Wide Area Network (WAN) infrastructure to support new business communication services.

In addition, they also wanted to be able to perform this network assessment in the most efficient, proactive, and detailed way possible. That’s why they turned to the network professionals at Obkio.

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Learn how to perform a network assessment with Obkio Network Monitoring to optimize network performance for a new service deployment or migration.

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A Real Time Media assessment is among the most important network monitoring use cases, along with network troubleshooting, and continuous network monitoring. It is used to qualify your network before the deployment of a new solution to identify issues with your LAN, WAN, firewalls, or Internet connectivity issues as early as possible.

You need to act sooner than later. During the buying process or before the service deployment, perform a Real Time Media analysis to validate that the end-to-end network performance, right from the customer to the service provider infrastructure, is able to meet the minimum published thresholds for Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business.

Specifically, ThinkTel wanted to leverage Obkio’s solution to work with their Real Time Media Assessment to get more comprehensive data about their clients’ network performance and quickly identify and solve network issues before deployment of new UC services. With Obkio’s solution for UC Monitoring, Obkio provides data on the metrics affecting UC apps the most.

For service providers, like ThinkTel, a network connection, be it either a private connection or internet connection, is the backbone of the new service. A common scenario is when an organization decides to migrate from on-premise VoIP to a hosted VoIP platform.

Service providers and their clients need to ensure that the network connection is strong and reliable before the service is deployed, and most importantly meeting the published thresholds for real-time media. If there’s an issue with the network quality after the deployment of the new service, customers will be frustrated and service providers will be scrambling to solve an issue that could have been identified earlier.

Obkio enables service providers like ThinkTel, to mitigate post-deployment risk by quickly finding issues and enabling their clients to resolve the issues before the new service is deployed and the migration is completed. In addition, ThinkTel’s clients can also leverage Obkio for continuous network performance monitoring after deployment to ensure their new systems are always performing as they should be.

In summary, the benefits include:

• Capacity Planning: Ensure that new clients always have enough network bandwidth to deploy new Unified Communication services.

• Identify Network Issues: Quickly identify and solve network issues that can negatively affect the deployment of new services and the performance after deployment.

• Continuous Monitoring: Continuously monitor various network metrics that impact audio and video services to detect any network problems such as latency, jitter, and packet loss even after deployment.

• Improved User Experience: Ensure that clients can benefit from optimal network and Unified Communication performance and are always satisfied with the quality of the services offered.

ThinkTel can now help businesses accelerate technology adoption, by avoiding failures, and client frustration by delivering a successful deployment the first time and start their business relationship on the right foot by starting it with success!