Psytechnics on its best behavior at VON

ATLANTA--BT spin-off Psytechnics unwrapped a new voice quality measurement software for voice-over-IP gateway manufacturers this week at VON that combines the behavioral characteristics of particular brands of equipment with a broad sampling of humanly perceived voice quality ratings to get a true quality measurement it says will remove the objections to VoIP.

Psytechnics PsyVoIP software works for both gateways and IP telephones. The company calibrates each device type and creates a performance characteristics file to embed in the software, which it sells to gateway and IP phone manufacturers. The company already sells voice quality software to major test equipment manufacturers such as Agilent. “In order to get accuracy in VoIP quality, you really have to know the components themselves and how they behave,” said Iain Wood, director of sales and marketing at Psytechnics. “You can’t say all IP phones behave the same way or all gateways behave the same way. So we have to take the painful step of bringing the device into a lab and calibrating them.”

Psytechnics combines the physical testing for noise, echo, jitter or packet loss with its calibration for specific equipment and incorporates the quality ratings determined through one-quarter of a million subjective votes from people listening to voice calls of varying quality in an acoustic lab.

“The software has to represent what people feel, but it also has to be able to fit into the technology that carries the signal,” Wood said.

In addition to Agilent, Wood said Empirix, Ascom and Radcom have all bought the company’s software to incorporate into their test platforms. Now Psytechnics is targeting not only gateway and IP phone manufacturers, but network management software companies as well.

Despite supplying test software for test equipment manufacturers who provide testing in both pre-production and post-production environments, Psytechnics doesn’t believe that all quality issues can be solved at the manufacturing level.

“It’s like buying a car that can go 120 mph, but it can’t do that all the time because there is other traffic on the road. So it doesn’t matter how finely you tune the engine you are dependent on who else is sharing the road,” Wood said.