How SD–WAN Improves Quality of Video Conferences for Home Users
The year 2020 has witnessed major upheavals around the globe including floods and forest fires due to climate change and spread of viruses. It has forced many organizations to organize work from home practices for employees to make sure smoother running of their businesses. As COVID-19 still dominates working life today. Office staff from around the world have settled into their working from home setups. At such a divergent point, effective communication between office employees and managing bodies becomes of crucial importance. Team managers require strong communication medium to stay in contact with their teams. That is the reason, it has given rise to a record increase in video conferencing over these years of pandemic. Many global businesses are forced to adopt the traditional face to face practices of video conferencing.
Good communication requires good quality video conferencing. While poor quality of video streaming leads to unclear communication which can be highly dubious for implementing the clear and precise business agenda. Hence, low quality video conferencing, which causes unclear communication, leads to lower efficiency and reduced productivity.
What Causes Poor Quality of Video Conferencing?
Shortage of bandwidth and low quality of the link causes slowing down of the video conferencing. In most of the networks, applications running over can be observed into a high competition for bandwidth allocation. Apps compete for the bandwidth. As we know that, a video conference of 720P requires around 2 Mbps of the bandwidth, while bandwidth of 4 Mbps is required for video conferencing at 1080P. If an application conducting video conferencing is not able to secure the required bandwidth, it will affect the connection making it slow and unstable.
On the other hand, video conferencing is also a link-sensitive application, which is very critical to the quality of the link. Even a packet loss rate of up to 3% and latency of up to 200ms can cause poor quality video conferencing with unstable frames. Such a situation brings frame issues in video conferencing, causing low quality in the video communication, especially for home-based users with low-speed networks.
SD–WAN Solution for Video Conferencing
Video Conferencing is an application of many protocols and forms. SD–WAN ensures high quality of video by guaranteeing the required bandwidth for video conferencing. It ensures the bandwidth by allocating high priority to that of video conferencing traffic from other applications of low priority. An SD–WAN device can easily be configured to assign priorities to all the running applications on the network. SD–WAN monitors very effectively the real traffic coming from the network to apply real time changes as per prioritized data. It makes sure the quality of video conferencing.
SD–WAN saves bandwidth by reducing other traffic which is less necessary and allocate it to video conferencing. For those customers having limited bandwidth but heavy corresponding traffic, traversing over the same link, SD–WAN is capable to reduce network traffic by 90% of its total size. It saves a lot of bandwidth for video conferencing, improving its quality by many folds. When multiple applications are running through the same connection tunnel, SD–WAN recognizes applications and can adapt bandwidth and other services accordingly. It provides the load balancing between the multiple parallel connections. It provides highly reliable and assured performance for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and video conferencing. SD–WAN has significantly enhanced the performance of voice and video streams. IT teams can help reduce latency issue, traffic shaping and packet loss by enabling the critical applications through reliable, high-performance connections.
SD–WAN also optimizes the link quality through Forward Error Correction (FEC) and packet redundancy. FEC and packet redundancy technology together lowers the packet loss rate by many turns reducing the loss ratio drastically, which ensures good quality video conferencing. Although, here comes technical issues related to proper working of FEC, in case of slow network speeds. SD-WAN is highly appropriate to detect these slow speed networks to adapt accordingly. It throttles the applications of low priority or even sometimes cease the working of forward error correction to compensate the low-speed networks.
SD–WAN’s dynamic path selection capability helps the customers having multiple WAN links to utilize optimal path. Based on the Quality of Experience i.e., Jitter, packet loss, and latency parameters, SD-WAN performs link detection for dynamically selecting optimal path for video conferencing. In this way, SD-WAN brings the practice of video conferencing on new heights by making sure the Quality of Services and enhanced user experience.
With VMware SD-WAN solution and its Multi-Path Dynamic Optimization Technology, SD–WAN by Velocloud also provides highly reliable and efficient performance for applications like VoIP, UCaaS, VDI and SaaS. This high-quality performance and reliable connectivity, assured through multi-path optimization and prioritization of applications, are based on their demand. For latency sensitive voice and video applications, such remedies have proven to be very effective. According to AT&T Business statistics, on a single link connection, Voice Quality Performance of SD–WAN Work-from-Home devices have computed to be 35% better than those of Non-SD-WAN configurations. Performance statistics for Video quality are even more satisfying than that of Audio quality. Work-from-Home SD-WAN configured Video quality is computed to be 531% better than those of Non-configured SD–WAN setup. This is highly promising and satisfactory performance by SD–WAN configuration for those of home-based users.
End Note
Although, SD-WAN eliminates the need for establishing physical connection between two nodes by connecting them logically. But its big advantage lies in the fact that it is link-agnostic. It means that SD–WAN does not bother about the nature of the line whether it is LTE, DSL, or DIA. It manages the links effectively regardless of which of the network type they belong to. Such a low-cost solution can significantly provide remarkable savings for remote and small sized offices. In comparison to those of the expensive MPLS circuits, Software Defined WAN solution is highly cost effective. Due to its wide range of applicable advantages, it is being rapidly adopted by businesses of all the scales around the globe.
To learn more about our Work-From-Home solutions based on VMware SD-WAN technology have a look at our Anywhere Office Offer and request for a Free trial.
