Addressing VoIP Speech Quality with Non-Intrusive Measurements

Integrating commercial or enterprise voice services on a data network can offer significant capital and operational cost reductions, and can enable new competitive services. However, if these business values are to be realized, customers must be won and retained by meeting their expectations for service quality.

To win and retain customers, voice service quality must meet customer expectations set by traditional circuit-switched networks. This can prove very difficult as time-sensitive VoIP packets require a minimum quality of service (QoS) on the data network to meet service quality objectives. VoIP packet loss, jitter, and delay must be tightly controlled by complex network mechanisms. In addition, other network resources such as vocoders, voice activity detectors, jitter buffers, echo cancellers, and various signal processors must be carefully selected and configured to minimize voice quality impairments.

In order to address these challenges, it is essential for a network operator to have visibility into the voice service quality being delivered to customers.