Well think again……
We had a very interesting workshop with one of Microsoft’s
PFEs this week, and the focus of this workshop was deep diving into Voice in
Lync 2013.
One important aspect of Voice is the implementation of CAC
and QOS in the customer network, end to end. Followers of my blog will know I
am strong supporter the end-to-end user experience. As a part of this, my strategy
is to try to convince all my customers to implement both QOS and CAC
(implementing one without the other could actually worsen the experience for
the end user).
Newsflash: Some of work you do to implement these function
could be “slightly” in vain. With Lync 2013 CU came Lync mobility with the
possibility to join audio, video and conference through WLAN on the mobile
device. This is great, and I use it a lot. However, as I have suspected, and now
confirmed; Mobile clients do NOT support CAC (nor are there any QoS mechanisms
on the devices).
A consequence of this is over-subscription of the capacity
configured in your network, and all clients in the subnets where mobile clients
exist can all suffer bad quality. Seeing how popular the mobility has become,
this can turn out to be a challenge for many a administrator.
I still believe you should implement QOS and CAC wherever
possible, but now we have to be aware of the mobile “surprise”, and try to calculate this into
the rest of your scheme. Let’s all hope Microsoft will look for a way to enable
QOS and CAC for mobile devices (They have for common area phones, so why not
the mobile devices?). I did not get a clear list of all devices not supporting
CAC, but I will post an update once I can get hold of such a list.
Anybody else with a thought on how to handle the subject, or
even better, experience from a deployment where this has been an issue?
