What Do Goldfish Have to Do with an IT Services Company specializing in VOIP?
Voice and Data convergence can be a very complex topic. It's easy to get lost in the concept if you don't have a good grasp on the technology. In an effort to make it easier to show you how voice and data will interact across a network, we created an analogy...
We came up with Goldfish!
Goldfish and their environment are a very good representation of how packets travel across a network. Here's the analogy:
Your Network hardware is represented by the bowl, which contains the protocol by which your network runs (Water=TCP/IP). The goldfish are the individual "packets" of voice and data information which travel or "swim" across your network. Your network might have many different kinds of applications traveling across it, hence the multiplicity of fish.
As your goldfish multiply (you add applications), you may need a bigger network (larger bowl). Of course goldfish need to eat too; In our analogy, your fish will feed on bandwidth... Data fish have a bigger appetite and will eat more than Voice. If you're not careful, data will gobble up all of the available bandwidth and voice will starve to death. To keep voice healthy and swimming around, you need to take steps to ensure it has enough food to eat. By implementing Quality of Service (QOS) measures on your network, it's as if you put your voice fish into a bowl within a bowl so they are always guaranteed to get adequate food without having to give them a separate container.
Your network needs to be secure. That's why you must keep it totally enclosed within its own bowl (your firewall [bowl cover] encloses your network). If you give the rest of the world access to your goldfish, they'd likely get eaten by sharks (Think hackers, crackers, crooks, spammers, scammers, and all other parasites). This is also true if you allow your packets to traverse the Internet without securing them in a Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnel. The Internet is full of predators who'd like nothing more than to have access to your tasty application and data fish... Think security, security, security.
The ocean isn't known for having the best water quality everywhere. In your bowl, you can control the quality and cleanliness of the water, thus keeping a healthy environment for your goldfish to thrive in. This same approach must be taken on your network. You must properly implement certain technologies to make sure your voice is prioritized, viruses are kept out and things like runaway network devices or inappropriate user activity aren't poisoning or flooding your network.
hopefully, I've made the point. If not, then consider this...
Goldfish swim in a Fluid Network!
This is a point that wasn't lost on our marketing people. Besides, Goldfish provide us with a really fun gift to let our customers know just how important they are to us AND to remind them that we're looking out for one of their most important assets... their data (and voice) network.