In addition, "you have to look at the vintage of all the Ethernet switches," Lambert says. "You should have Ethernet layer 2 and routing layer 3. You also do want to get the tools. Make sure they're good and in your budget from the beginning. That causes disappointment among executives when all of a sudden the cost of tools is added to the equation. You can pay [up to] $20,000 for Cisco's tools in a medium-sized company," Lambert says.

On the Horizon

Costs aside, performance stands to improve even more in the year ahead. For one thing, vendors are expected this year to offer products that allow for QoS reporting calls based on SIP. Meanwhile, standards such as RTPC-XR (RTP Control Protocol Extended Reports), currently in the RFC stage with the IETF, will allow for better end-point monitoring, according to Telchemy's Clark.

"Performance management frameworks use these standards, and they need IP phone suppliers to support these," Clark says. "Test-equipment vendors use them. We gave [the IETF] ... key information they needed about protocols," Clark says.

Emerging standards will also help keep voice performance at a satisfactory level. Haltom says he looks forward to the IEEE's emerging PVQM (Proactive Voice Quality Monitoring) standard, developed with Telchemy and based on RTCP XR. "This is what we are truly waiting on to get [fully] implemented over the next couple of months in order to gain a pro-active handle on VOIP session-related issues such and echo, jitter, and other latency-type issues," he says.