Ditech Hits the Brix on VoIP Voice Quality

Quality has become a real issue in the VoIP market and this time around it isn’t a lack of quality making news, but the ability to prove quality from an end-user perspective. To that end, Brix Networks  and Ditech Networks announced a collaboration agreement that will help service providers connect voice quality impairments with customer-perceived quality.

Brix, a provider of converged service assurance solutions, and Ditech, a provider of voice quality solutions, have integrated their respective products now that Brix has joined Ditech’s EXi Everywhere Partner Program. Ditech’s EXi, short for Experience Intelligence, technology will work with the BrixCall advanced call signaling analysis and media correlation application and complete the company’s voice quality measurement technology.

The combined solution will help VoIP providers to view how voice quality impairments, such as packet loss, echo, mismatched speech levels and background noise, impact the quality of experience.

“It’s not an easy problem to solve. All but packet loss are external impairments and no one else has the [capabilities for] the outside network stuff,” said Ken Croley, senior director of corporate marketing at Ditech.

EXi quantifies the impact of voice quality impairments caused by location issues, codec impairments, packet loss, and by a wide variety of mobile devices themselves. By tapping into this technology, Brix will be able to measure signal-to-noise ratio and other details about the impact that substandard voice quality. It will be able to capture voice quality impairments that originate from the subscriber’s environment, and add that view to impairments originating in the network, to provide its customers a comprehensive picture of actual voice quality that is experienced by subscribers.

In an audit of live mobile calls that leaves no question about its sample size (630 million calls in 16 different networks across 12 countries,) Ditech used its EXi technology to discover that 39 percent of all mobile calls fall below the minimum standard for voice quality. These calls, the company said in its report from February, are in the churn zone.

“A one percent to five percent reduction in churn can save a service provider tens of millions of dollars. So when you see results like this you have to tell the service provider that although the network is their baby, the baby is ugly,” Croley said.

The audit was conducted to determine how mobile devices and the caller’s environment affect voice quality. {vpipagebreak}

Ditech’s audits uncovered a number of facts about voice quality in the mobile services industry. Of note was that in mature markets such as the United States and Western Europe, 23 percent of all calls fall below the industry minimum. And in emerging markets, such as the Middle East, India and South America, 59 percent underachieve.

Impairments such as acoustic echo and voice level mismatches were considered objectionable in 11 percent and 28 percent of all calls respectively.

The audit data was used to derive an R-Factor, which is a 1 to100 (best) rating system developed by the ITU to assess customer satisfaction with voice quality. The R-Factor was converted to a mean opinion score (MOS), which is widely used in the mobile services industry to rate voice quality on a scale of 1 to 5 (best.) The ITU has set the minimum level of acceptable voice quality at R-Factor 50, or MOS 2.5. Voice quality

that is rated below these minimums is considered unacceptable.

According to the report, poor voice quality is believed to have caused more than 66.5 million mobile subscribers to churn during 2007, ultimately costing

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines

Read Comments [0]