VoIP quality: can you hear me now?

At a NetWorld+Interop session here on VoIP, users and network consultnats discussed the art of derermining voice quality over an IP connection.

"You can buy a lot of expensive equipment to test voice quality," said Susan Knott, global network architect for PricewaterhouseCoopers consulting. "But I've found that if my vice president of finance can talk to my CIO [over a VoIP connection], and they both say the quality of the connection is OK with them, then I say that's good enough."

In other words, VoIP quality is in the ear of the end-user. Matthew Liste, practice manager for ThruPoint, a network consultancy, agrees with this notion.

"The best way to test quality is to just put phones out there and see what people say," he says. The formal way by which voice quality has been tested in the past was to put a group of people in a room and have them rate phone sound quailty on a scale from one to five. This Mean Opinion Score (MOS) test can be carried out in an enterprise on a less formal basis, Liste said.

"If you put [IP] phones out," he said, "and ask people to occasionally write down the quality of their calls from one to five, you basically have a MOS score right there.

Post a comment

Breaking N+I news
Latest product and tech news from the show.

Contact Senior Editor Tim Greene and Senior Writer Phil Hochmuth.

RSS feed
Put Network World N+I headlines on your site.