Most small businesses have long viewed video as either too costly or complex to incorporate into their communications strategy. Today, however, the costs are minimal and the products are plentiful and easy to use.

The only thing that might be stopping video from looking good to your company is your network.

Video, like voice, is a real-time application. It doesn't tolerate delay very well. A few lost packets can cause "tiling" or a garbled picture, along with distortions that can make audio sound like a bad cell phone connection. To ensure that a videoconference maintains acceptable quality, it must be guaranteed a certain amount of bandwidth on the network.

Webcams and videoconferencing also open a window into your network that could be used as an illegal access point for hackers. For this reason, you want to make sure that your network has sufficient security controls to keep the rest of your business applications safe.

Quality of Service provides the "smarts"

Internet Protocol is designed as a "best effort" service, which means that without some type of intelligent controls in the network, all traffic will receive equal delivery treatment, and data, voice and video traffic could compete with and undermine each other.

Quality of Service is a set of standards-based tools or mechanisms that enable the network to intelligently identify and route traffic based on its priority and ensures that voice, video and data applications perform well.

A Quality of Service solution is not implemented in a single device. In order to work effectively, all of the equipment that has a role in forwarding traffic through the network (for example, routers and switches) should support Quality of Service. Even more importantly, these different network components must have the same understanding of how traffic is to be classified and prioritized, otherwise there will be a breakdown in communication — and congestion — somewhere in the system. Fortunately, industry standards from groups such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) help devices talk a common Quality of Service language.

Video requires adequate bandwidth on your wide-area network (WAN) connection. This will likely be an ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network), DSL or cable connection. Keep in mind that cable is designed for asymmetrical transmission, meaning smaller uploads and larger downloads; videoconferencing requires the same amount of bandwidth for uploads and downloads. So depending on the demands of your network, cable may not be the best broadband choice.

Revving up your router

Perhaps the most important network device to review prior to adding video is your router, the device that intelligently forwards data packets from one network (your LAN) to another (the Internet). Some routers marketed to small businesses are actually consumer-grade routers designed for home users who need simple Internet access. If you want to make a serious foray into video, you want a business-class router that provides security, performance and reliability.

A good business-class router will incorporate both Quality of Service, as described above, and firewall protection, including:

• Access Control Lists (ACLs) of permitted and prohibited addresses that allow transmissions to be accepted or rejected based on their origin or destination.

• Network Address Translation (NAT) to re-addresses data packets as they pass through the firewall. NAT has two very important values: it simplifies address management by allowing administrators to assign a single external address for all internal users, and it also masks the true addresses of internal computers and servers from the outside world. Some firewalls also feature Port Address Translation (PAT) and a built-in Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server, which automatically assigns network addresses to all internal computers when they are powered on; this is an important feature for small companies that want to simplify administration of their security systems as much as possible.

Another important thing to look for in a business-class router is Web-based management software that makes it easy and intuitive to set both the Quality of Service and security controls you need for your company.

Switching looks good

If your network is still based on hubs, a video application could affect the performance of your LAN. All users connected to a single hub are in the same segment, which means they are competing for a fixed amount of bandwidth. Also, hubs cannot differentiate high-priority applications or users from low-priority ones.

The solution is to replace your hubs with switches. Rather than making all devices share the same bandwidth at the same time, a switch creates instant networks that connect the pair of devices communicating with each other at any particular moment. This means that everyone in the network gets a full 10 megabits per second (Ethernet) or 100 mbps (Fast Ethernet) connection.

With switches, users communicate at much higher speeds and with far greater reliability. The good news is that the price of Ethernet switches has fallen, making business-class switches readily affordable for small businesses.

If you're doing videoconferencing to the desktop, you'll need switches with built-in Quality of Service to prioritize the video traffic and give it the bandwidth it requires without compromising high-priority data or voice traffic sharing the same network.

Switches also allow you to monitor all of the traffic on your network and get a better idea of how the network is keeping up with different users and applications. You can then use the switch or router's Quality of Service to adjust traffic priorities in order to prevent bottlenecks.