NEW YORK -- Verizon Business this week launched a service for its MPLS VPN customers that allows them to better assess and manage voice quality on their networks.

The carrier’s Network Assessment with Voice offering is a reporting service for Verizon Business Private IP customers to help them make sure VoIP is deployed correctly. The service is designed to help users accurately size their network for VoIP, fine-tune call quality in an existing network running data and voice traffic, and appropriately prioritize network traffic to accommodate voice applications.

The service uses software from Centrisoft, a developer of tools for application performance management. Verizon Business announced the new service during the FutureNet Expo conference here this week.

Network Assessment with Voice also can assess the efficiency of VoIP implementations on competitors’ VPN services, Verizon Business says. The service can be used to inventory all network application traffic and enable IT managers to determine whether certain applications are interfering with VoIP data, the carrier says.

The software-only service is an alternative to a customer’s in-house or a hardware-based system.

The carrier also unveiled a service-level agreement (SLA) that measures audio clarity to further support the deployment of VoIP. The Mean Opinion Score (MOS) SLA augments the current Jitter SLA available for VoIP and video applications, and uses a quantitative measure of audio clarity as defined by the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector. The measure tests the users’ voice-quality experience.

The SLA attempts to guarantee that monthly average MOS performance for VoIP traffic on a Private IP customer’s U.S. network will not drop below 4.0.

The Network Assessment with Voice and MOS SLA are part of Verizon Business’ Application Aware suite of reporting capabilities launched a year ago. They will be available globally later this month for U.S.-based multinational customers.

The one-time cost for a 45-day assessment service is about $20,000.

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