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“It is not just about kbps” is the statement ringing in my head after a discussion I had at TMC’s (News - Alert) Communications Developer Conference in Santa Clara, CA (News - Alert) last month with Praveen Kumar, the co-founder and president of Packet Island. As Praveen pointed out, a network can become flooded with packets when VoIP is deployed. In some cases, packet volumes can increase by a factor of ten or more.

 

To help companies cope with the ever-increasing number of packets on a network the company makes an appliance designed to sit in front of the PBX and monitor quality metrics. For those of you interested in the open-source world, the company also makes a software agent for Asterisk. Furthermore Packet Island has partnered with Fonality (News - Alert), Digium and Epygi.

 

Our conversation focused on IP Centrex for a while and more specifically why the adoption of this technology has been slower than expected. Praveen believes the reason has to do with quality and this concurs with some informal research I have done in the area.

 

The quality issue is why Packet Island (News - Alert) is targeting service providers and VARs with its solutions, the goal being to help providers better manage VoIP on their customers’ networks.

 

Packet Island will even take care of Tier 2 support and VAR training if needed. The company has a service which monitors VoIP lines for a $3 per month. If the pricing sounds familiar, it is because AT&T (News - Alert) will charge you a bit more for its WirePro service to monitor PSTN lines.

 

The eventual goal of Packet Island is to become the HP OpenView of the market where it relates to SaaS. This equates to hosted network monitoring.

 

My take on Packet Island is that the company is positioned well; more and more firms are getting excited about the potential to offload technology problems to others. This is especially true in smaller companies where there is no money to hire expensive MIS people to handle the network management.