Verizon ups ante on VoIP quality

Verizon Business last week took a step forward in enabling its large business customers to more confidently launch voice over IP as part of a network convergence strategy. The company introduced a new service level agreement on its Private IP Service that guarantees a 4.0 mean opinion score on VoIP services delivered over its EF class of service.

That's the highest MOS score guarantee offered today, according to industry analysts, and could fuel a scramble to match it.

“There is a competitive dynamic involved,” said David Hold, an analyst for Current Analysis. “If someone else is offering a 3.8 MOS, and Verizon can come in with a 4.0, then it's an advantage for them.”

What Verizon is offering is a 4.0 MOS, based on an ITU standard, that derives a MOS from a specified combination of packet loss, delay and jitter, Hold said.

In addition, Verizon Business announced Network Assessment with Voice, a new service being added to Verizon's Application Aware suite of reporting tools that offers U.S.-based corporations the opportunity to evaluate their global networks and see how the applications they are running affect both the WAN and LAN, said Julie Vance, manager of private IP services for Verizon Business.

“As enterprises introduce more applications onto their data networks, they also introduced new complexity for network management,” she said. “We understand these challenges and their need for ongoing support on dynamically changing networks. We can help them make sure critical data and voice networks can successfully navigate with the appropriate [quality of service].”

Being able to reassure corporate customers that their voice services won't suffer is important, said Will Stofega, an analyst for IDC, in part because consumer VoIP offerings may have left a negative impression of service reliability.

“Making sure that IP works in a way that is predictable and reliable is a concern, and I think in some cases, some of this concern is begin driven by consumer-based services,” he said.

Those concerns only grow when corporations consider converging VoIP and data services onto one IP pipe, Stofega added. “Now all your eggs are in one basket, and you want to make sure your voice service doesn't degrade.”

The Network Assessment with Voice helps corporations see how adding VoIP will affect their LAN operation, Hold pointed out, which is a key benefit.

“A lot of companies really have not done a close evaluation of applications performance and how it affected the performance of other apps in the LAN,” he said. “When things go wrong in the LAN, you just added more bandwidth. In the WAN, where bandwidth was expensive, then people had to characterize their application traffic more closely.”

VoIP has caused problems for some early adopters because their networks were not designed to handle real-time traffic, he added.

One of the goals of the 45-day assessment service is to enable corporations to get their networks set up correctly from the outset, Vance said.

Verizon is offering the assessment service to its customers and to its competitors' customers-something analysts thinks will be a unique advantage.

“It's unusual,” Stofega said. “Services are where the game is-managed services, a consulting-type engagement. If things don't go right with a competitor, then Verizon has a relationship there.”