Technology news and Jobs 
VIRTUALISATION VoIP over the Internet - poor and getting worse
VIRTUALISATION VoIP over the Internet - poor and getting worse | VoIP over the Internet - poor and getting worse |
|
| by Stuart Corner | |
| Tuesday, 25 July 2006 | |
  
The Brix portal, TestYourVoIP.com, enables consumers to independently measure the quality of their broadband Internet phone connections. Brix has now released this as a Google Gadget - an interactive, mini-application that users can download (www.TestYourVoIP.com/gadget) and that displays a "weather map" on the Google desktop indicating the Internet's current ability to support real-time services, such as VoIP and IPTV. According to Brix, almost one million Internet phone tests have been conducted by users from around the world since the launch of the portal in March 2004. "From late 2004 through mid-2006, the test results generated by Test YourVoIP.com showed a consistent decrease in overall voice quality as calculated via a Mean Opinion Score (MOS), a common objective measure of conversational voice quality that rates calls on a scale from one (bad) to five (excellent). Test calls with a MOS of 3.6 or better are typically regarded as having satisfactory quality," Brix says. "The number of test calls throughout this time that achieved a MOS of 3.6 or higher, also known as Acceptable Call Quality (ACQ), was only 81 percent." MOS is the international standard method (ITU standard P.800) of measuring the quality of a telephone call and predates VoIP. More information can be found in Wikipedia. "Over the last few years, the global market for consumer VoIP services has grown to nearly 20 million subscribers. These results from TestYourVoIP.com indicate that during this same period Internet call quality has declined," said Kaynam Hedayat, vice president, engineering, and chief technology officer at Brix. "For long-term sustainability, providers of Internet phone services will need to concentrate on the root causes of call quality degradation, including late packet discards, lost packets, and round-trip voice latency." The Brix systems uses a small applet that users download and which initiates a test phone call using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Network-based Brix Verifiers answer these test calls and measure the quality of the "conversation". Verifiers are currently installed at test locations in Boston, Helsinki, London, Montreal, San Jose, Sydney, and Vienna. A commercial version of TestYourVoIP.com is available that enables VoIP service providers to assess the quality of a potential subscriber's Internet connection to support VoIP services and to provide ongoing, self-help customer support. {moscomment} |
Tags
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
