* Delving into the results of tests by Brix Networks
Following up on our interest about consumer VoIP quality for BYOB (bring your own broadband) service, like those provided by Vonage, AT&T CallVantage and Skype, we decided to talk with some experts at Brix Networks about their perspectives.
Following up on our interest about consumer VoIP quality for BYOB (bring your own broadband) service, like those provided by Vonage, AT&T CallVantage and Skype, we decided to talk with some experts at Brix Networks about their perspectives.
Brix, which offers users a free VoIP testing application at www.testyourvoip.com, also offers service providers, carriers, and cable companies the ability to continuously monitor their various IP-based services (VoIP, IPTV, VPNs) and take necessary corrective action before problems impact subscribers.
Since Brix has tested more than a million VoIP connections using its products, we asked Kaynam Hedayat, vice president of engineering and CTO, and John Burnham, VP of marketing, a few questions about the results.
According to Brix, the cause of voice quality degradation is almost split evenly between latency, jitter, packet discard, and Codec issues – although packet discard was slightly leading the pack as a source of bad BYOB VoIP call quality. And it seems that both DSL and cable modem services are equally guilty when it comes to creating facility-based problems for VoIP.
When we asked the experts about what affect increasing access to greater and greater broadband speeds have on causing network problems, Brix noted that the root cause is not so much that users have greater to higher broadband speeds but that applications like video and downloads are more likely the real culprit for causing congestion. Of course, faster connectivity enables these applications to be more quickly accessed, but service providers have also exacerbated the problem by putting in more and more edge routers and aggregation points associated with DSL Access Multiplexers between the user and the eventual application or content source, thereby putting in place more choke points that can cause jitter, delay, and packet loss.
So what can be done to solve these issues? We’ll talk about that next time.
