"Can you hear me now?' may be the issue for mobile users (according to VerizonWireless), but for voice and video over IP users, it's really 'How well can you hear me? see me?' Here we'll write about ways to improve, issues and who's got what part of the challenge solved (or not).
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Thursday, 16 August 2007 |
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 On a sunny afternoon in the beginning of August 2007, Brockmann & Company took a meeting off Copley Square with Anthony Finbow, CEO and Dr Mike Hollier, CTO of Psytechnics, the voice and video quality company.
As a preamble to the firm's participation in Fall VoiceCon August 20-23, a trip to the Boston area to see the New Hampshire office, meet customers and partake in an analyst meeting or two made the effort most productive. Our meeting centered on the history of the firm and the dynamics of their market plans.
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Wednesday, 27 June 2007 |
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 In researching my entry about Intelliverse and VoIP quality, I checked out the folks at Brix Networks. There I found a neat link to a delay and jitter measurement site. They have deployed agents in each of a half-dozen sites around the world (London, Boston, San Jose, Montreal to name a few) and measure the session performance between your location and their endpoint.
The reports coming back from the site: testyouripvideo.com are web-automated and both simple and sophisticated, depending on how detailed you really want to get. This is the simple report on the left, which I have rotated to fit in the blog presentation window. From this report, I can see clearly that my DSL is more than sufficiently fast and stable to satisfy their probe in a Northborough MA <--> San Jose CA test (according to Google, it's 3,091 miles west of here).
The detailed report is also interesting.
Here Brix reports the roundtrip delay (209 ms), latency, packet discards and packet losses in a pie and then in a tabular form for both up and down stream tests. The packet discards and packet loss strike me as being synonyms, but there's no report of a jitter (variability in packet arrival). Maybe that's the packet discard?
The detailed report includes signaling losses too.
I'll try other measurement cities for fun.
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Monday, 25 June 2007 |
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 This may be the right question for mobile users, but is the question, "Can you hear me now?" the right question for VoIP users, for business VoIP users?
I spoke with Frank Paterno, VP Marketing for Intelliverse (not on the left), the Atlanta-based hosted VoIP provider, who briefed me on what the company is doing to assure VoIP quality in the 'bring your own broadband' segment. The company has two leading segments, the wholesale VoIP market where Intelliverse is inside the VoIP services platform of Covad and other ISPs, and a network of agents reselling services in the 'bring your own broadband' network.
Intelliverse has licensed the deployment of Brix Networks technology passive monitoring software agents in remote points in their network. The Brix agent simulates SIP and RTP streams as approximations of VoIP calls allowing the measurement of jitter, packet loss and delay characteristics. From these measurements, the Brix software can estimate the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) approximations of the user experience for sessions approximately traversing the same path. In this way, the company's Network Operations engineers can take corrective action if available.
Simulation is necessary, according to Frank, since the company doesn't control the network endpoints which is required for real-time endpoint VoIP quality management. Even still, the service provider continues to push its VoIP quality agenda and expects to differentiate itself around this capability and a continuing plan for enhancements. So, instead of asking 'Can you hear me?' we will be asking 'How well can you hear me? On a scale of 1 to 5 where 5....'
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Wednesday, 06 June 2007 |
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Most small and medium business deployments of IP PBX functionality have kept all the voice in the LAN. That's because most of this class of user had simple wide area network needs and were the target of the early vendors into the IP PBX market.
Some larger organizations and even carriers implemented VoIP traffic across the WAN, but learned the importance of always paying careful attention to the voice quality. Features like Quality of Service, Differentiated Services and even MPLS Class of Service are all system-wide features available to sophisticated networks to assure that voice quality is high.
Now, as hosted VoIP services pushes traffic streams for the small and medium businesses across the LAN into the WAN for termination on IP endpoints of other companies or on gateways for PSTN terminations, what easy to use features are available for small and medium business? home workers? and even consumers?
Surely audio quality is important for these organizations and people too?
That's where the iSpeedbump from InterWorking Labs comes in. I met Chris Wellens, the CEO of the SIP and SNMP test software company, at Interop where we talked about the company and their latest new product.
 This neat little appliance fits between the LAN and the WAN link. Using the technique of monitoring packet flow for SIP messages (which look like http messages) and then discovering which ports are used, the device then assigns priority to the real-time packets by buffering the other traffic through a queuing sequence. In this way, VoIP or video over IP traffic can get a speed bump-up, or at least a bump-up in priority.
I have been on my WiFi-attached IP phone system while my son begins to play networked Halo which created a serious degradation in voice quality - packet loss and jitter - so much so, I had to switch to a mobile call the old fashioned way by hanging up one phone and dialing up on the other.
This small site VoIP Quality Assurance Appliance takes bandwidth management to a new small scale, where it is definitely needed. $499 for better audio quality? Bring it on!
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Tuesday, 13 March 2007 |
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At VoiceCon last week (I was there Tuesday March 6 - Thursday March 8) I had a chance to speak with Benjamin Ellis, the VP of Marketing for Psytechnics. The company is big on the VoIP users' experience. With extensive capabilities for measuring and managing the quality of VoIP quality, the company's 40 + employees ought to be very proud of having their benchmark test method referenced in a recent Microsoft press kit reference.
In this report Psytechnics proves that the Microsoft Vista softphone delivers greater perceived VoIP quality than a market leading IP phone implementation. It seems that Microsoft plans to drive the Quality of Experience as its key differential, to position their softphone against the hard IP phone category. From my recent work it is clear that the adoption of softphones is a key technology that improves customer satisfaction and user satisfaction, the two most important performance metrics measured.
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The Value of Video Communications
