Huawei High-Quality 10 Gbps CloudCampus Delivers Best-in-Class Audio and Video Conference Experience: Seamless Communication, Flawless Video

Ni Nan

Campus Network Marketing Manager of Huawei Datacom Product Line

Nowadays, as enterprises ramp up digital transformation, audio and video services have become a new normal on enterprise campus networks. In particular, videoconferencing has become an important means for enterprises to improve their daily work efficiency.

A well-known bank in Europe, for example, operates in more than 20 countries and serves over 40 million users. Due to business growth in recent years, the bank has seen demand for audio and video conferences skyrocket, with an average of nearly 3000 video conferences held per day. Indeed, the quality of videoconferencing directly impacts the bank's business efficiency. Especially at the headquarters, executives and employees from key transaction departments have long been dissatisfied with videoconferencing experience. Worse yet, in key corporate conferences, the IT team provides strong assurance throughout conferences but still suffers from audio lag and video freezing, causing frequent complaints from executives.

What are the exact reasons for audio lag and choppy video during video conferences?

The first reason is that traditional campus networks use 'best-effort' forwarding. Specifically, the network does its best to deal with user requests and transmit data, but suffers from undifferentiated packet loss when congested. For example, when both download and video services run on the network, user experience for the two types of services are good if bandwidth resources are sufficient. However, when there are not enough bandwidth resources, the two services will contend for bandwidth resources, degrading user experience.

According to the traffic model of a campus network, bandwidth at the aggregation layer and above is generally high, at about 40 Gbps to 100 Gbps, which means a wide transmission pipe. In contrast, bandwidth at the access layer is usually low, just about 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps, meaning a narrow transmission pipe. As a result, service congestion easily happens on the access side.

Another reason is the complexity of user experience issues. Unlike network connectivity issues, user experience issues involve a larger scope of fault locating, more Network Elements (NEs), and stronger mobility, burstiness, and randomness. IT teams usually invest a lot of manpower and material resources but still fail to identify root causes or determine optimization measures. They are often left with no choice but to shoulder the blame.

Huawei's Audio and Video Conference Experience Assurance Solution

That's where Huawei's Audio and Video Conference Experience Assurance Solution can help.

This solution builds on three engines: application identification engine, application management engine, and experience visibility engine. With these, Huawei's solution upgrades all aspects from network planning to operations and maintenance (O&M) to take audio and video conference experience on campus networks to new levels.

The application identification engine intelligently identifies audio and video traffic and marks such traffic with high priority.

The application management engine ensures that the marked audio and video traffic is always in the preferential scheduling queue and forwarded first on the campus network. In other words, audio and video services are always in the 'fast lane'.

The experience visibility engine uses Packet Conservation Algorithm for Internet (iPCA) technology to detect the network quality (including the packet loss rate and two-way delay) for specified applications (especially SaaS applications) on hop-by-hop devices. Plus, the network digital map function of Huawei iMaster NCE can measure end-to-end experience of key applications from the wireless air interface side to the wired side, demarcate and locate faults in minutes based on time and space dimensions, and ensure end-to-end videoconferencing experience.

After deploying Huawei's Audio and Video Conference Experience Assurance Solution, the above-mentioned European bank has seen greatly improved videoconferencing experience, 80% higher user satisfaction, and 90% fewer complaints. Due to these tangible benefits, the bank's senior management then decided to make this deployment a benchmark for large-scale promotion to more regions. The bank has plans to deploy this solution soon in Germany, Spain, and Austria.

With the constant evolution of office software and communication methods, videoconferencing is becoming a crucial service for enterprise operations. Against this background, the quality of audio and video conferences is becoming more important than ever for enterprises, and its application scope is expanding day after day. Huawei's Audio and Video Conference Experience Assurance Solution keeps up with this through non-stop technological innovation and field-proven practices to deliver best-in-class audio and video conference experience and ensure always-smooth enterprise services.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, products, and technologies of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. If you need to learn more about the products and technologies of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., please visit our website at e.huawei.com or contact us.