On the Mark

24.07.2006
Listen up! VOIP quality ... of service is bad and getting worse. And IT is using the wrong tools to measure the aural performance of voice-over-IP calls. After looking at 18 months of data gathered on Brix Networks Inc.'s www.testyourVOIP.com Web site, Kaynam Hedayat, the Chelmsford, Mass.-based company's chief technology officer, found that end users rated one out of five VOIP calls "unsatisfactory" using the telecommunications industry's standard mean opinion score (MOS) metric. Hedayat admits to being surprised, having expected a 90 percent to 95 percent satisfaction rate among callers. Worse still, he says, the data indicates that things are getting, well, worse. "Voice quality is actually decreasing on the Internet," Hedayat says, speculating that increasing data traffic, particularly video streams, is contributing to the problem. "Going blindly into voice over IP and expecting the same quality as POTS is not realistic," he cautions, referring to plain old telephone service.

Benjamin Ellis, vice president of marketing at Psytechnics Ltd., a voice technology test and measurement firm in Ipswich, England, contends that IT looks at the problem incorrectly when it just analyzes the IP part of the VOIP equation. "Using IP tools to measure a system doesn't tell you about the voice bits that determine voice quality," he says. For example, losing 10 percent of a session's packets may not affect a call's MOS results. But losing a different 10 percent of the packets could make the call unbearable.

Ellis says you need to go beyond the usual IP metrics of jitter and packet loss and focus on session-layer data that better shows the characteristics of a voice call. When you sign up your company for a VOIP service, he says, demand metrics based on perceptual evaluation of speech quality, a standard developed by Psytechnics, BT Group PLC and other companies, under the auspices of the International Telecommunication Union. For more information, go to www.pesq.org.

Hola, amigo. ?Que es nuevo ...

... in the world of IT? Well, how about a bilingual personalized 511 service? If you live in an urban region of the U.S. that offers 511 traffic reports, you know how they can help your company's mobile staffers get around. Residents of some cities in North Carolina and Florida will soon be able to sign up for an English or Spanish "concierge service" that will call you if your stored profile indicates you could encounter traffic problems, says Fred Korangy, CEO of LogicTree Corp. in Bowie, Md. His company's Extreme Recognition Framework recognizes which language you're using and offers information accordingly.

Korangy explains that the 511 service gets real-time feeds of traffic conditions directly from highway sensors and other reports and then translates the data for callers. He says the system is tuned to interpret calls received on lousy cell phone (and maybe VOIP) connections. The free concierge service is scheduled to go live in September.