Testing VoIP for quality

As the voice-over-IP market matures, and customers look beyond low prices in choosing a service provider, the pressure grows to not only deliver high-quality voice but also to improve the quality of customer experience.

The challenge in doing this for VoIP is that a large number of factors are at play in the quality equation, including the underlying broadband service and equipment within the home.

“We really were lacking in this capability to try to measure and monitor the quality of service out to the customer endpoint,” said Mark Fedor, chief technology officer of VoIP provider SunRocket. “We have more than 200,000 end points out there that we like to monitor, but we had no way to do it.”

SunRocket initially worked with home networking router-maker Linksys, which provides many of those end points, in using a draft standard, known as session initiation protocol (SIP) media loopback testing. The two then paired with Brix Networks, which provides service assurance technology, to create network visibility down to the network end point.

“We are still defining the process,” Fedor said. “It's cutting-edge technology now, but we don't expect there to be a lot of changes in the standard.”

The loopback testing is done on an automated basis, to periodically monitor the quality of the service, and on-demand as needed when customers call to report problems, said John Burnham, vice president of marketing for Brix. It can detect problems with equipment, DSL lines or cable modem service.

Part of what Brix provides is correlation of the data so that it can be used for a variety of purposes — and understood not just by technicians but also marketing executives and other decision-makers.

For the customer service representative who takes a customer's call, the testing process will enable a faster identification and resolution of problems, which will both encourage customer retention and lower costs, Fedor said.

He would like to see the entire VoIP industry embrace the emerging standard, which is currently an Internet Engineering Task Force working group draft but is targeted to become a request for comments later this year. One reason SunRocket is pushing to get SIP media loopback testing deployed is to show the industry its value, Fedor said.

“Once we show the industry this is a good thing, we want to see other vendors adopt this because it is a standard,” Fedor said. “We utilize multiple vendors in our service, and we want to see them adopt this as well.”