PacketPro is for:

VoIP service provider support staff who have a need to diagnose complex VoIP quality issues at customer sites without truck rolls
Managed Service Providers and IT outsourcers who offer full IT/network outsourcing to large multi-site enterprises

Today when a service provider has to diagnose complex customer network issues they have three options:
Technican dispatch (truck roll)
Here a technician who is local to the customer site is asked to visit the site with a laptop and network tap. Since most field technicians are not experts in troubleshooting complex TCP/IP issues, they end up serving as "remote smart hands" to the expert sitting at the service provider headquarters. The field technician uses his/her laptop to capture data according to the advice of the expert, who then analyzes the data to determine the source of the problem. Very often, due to the transient nature of TCP/IP problems, the technician has to spend a lot of time at the customer site to wait for the problem to re-occur. Therefore this process tends to be very expensive and time consuming for service providers.

Deploy a Managed Edge Router at each customer site
Here the managed edge router with its advanced statistic collection and flow monitoring capability allows the service provider expert to gain relatively more visibility into the customer issue as it happens. However, most managed edge routers are limited by their hardware/software capacity to do advanced fine-grained monitoring of flows like VoIP and Video, or store the data for intelligent correlation. Therefore they tend to provide limited information about aggregate flow trends and perhaps some useful summary stats like worst jitter, worst loss, etc. Though this approach tends to provide some visibility into the nature of problems affecting customer networks, they fall short of answering key question such as the timing of the problem, duration of the problem, nature of the problem, and root cause of the problem. Besides providing limited visibility, this approach also tends to be expensive as it requires every customer site to deploy a specific brand of managed service router.

Dedicated PC with remote desktop control
Using this approach, a PC is installed with remote deskptop control software and is dedicated for remote packet capture use by the service provider. This approach is better than the managed edge router approach in the sense that packet captures can be done at the click of a button. However this approach is expensive due to the need to have dedicated PCs at each customer site. Furthermore, in this approach, the PC will need additional software to monitoring VoIP/Video flows and to do SLA monitoring on a 24x7 basis.

PacketPro offers several benefits that makes it superior to the approaches described above:

• It uses a router-vendor-agnostic 4"x5" device that can be deployed in any small-medium customer network to perform remote diagnostics. PacketPro comes in a sturdy case which makes it easy to ship the device to a customer site. This avoids having to force-deploy a managed edge router or deploy and manage a dedicated PC at each customer site


• The devices are simple to deploy with flexible connection options that allow for in-line as well as mirror-port connections. Furthermore, no firewall re-configuration is required when deploying the device at the customer site


• Remotely troubleshoot VoIP issues by monitoring live VoIP calls to characterize degradation and source of degradation. On-demand reporting is available to correlate large datasets to simplify VoIP problem diagnosis


• Remotely generate live VoIP calls to assess the VoIP capacity and bottlenecks of the customer LAN/WAN


• Remotely initiate packet captures using customizable filters to gain deep visibility into problems

There are three revenue sources one can tap into using PacketPro:

VoIP Network Assessment services
VoIP Deployment Verification and Snapshot services
VoIP and Network Troubleshooting

VoIP network assessments involve performing assessments at a customer site before deploying VoIP. Depending on the size of a customer install, small VoIP assessments can yield anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several thousands of dollars. Furthermore, a comprehensive assessment usually exposes weaknesses in a customer network requiring LAN and/or WAN upgrades, thus adding to the revenue opportunity.

VoIP deployment verification and snapshot reports capture the performance of every phone, along with the traffic profile of the network at the time of the install. Such a report provides a baseline that assists with network capacity planning and trend analysis. Furthermore, it simplifies troubleshooting VoIP problems in the future. This report usually requires the installer to spend an extra ten minutes per phone to capture, verify, and document its performance data. A detailed verification snapshot usually can be priced at $10-$20 per deployed phone. Or alternatively, it can priced on a Time & Materials (T&M) basis.

The third revenue opportunity enabled by PacketPro is from consulting services to troubleshoot problematic converged media network deployments. PacketPro enables you to troubleshoot both transient VoIP issues that are tough to duplicate as well as recurring VoIP issues. Using the two micro-appliances, one can quickly characterize the problem and determine its source. Such a consulting service can be either offered on a fixed hourly fee basis, or as a monthly service contract fee.