New Study Claims VoIP Quality Improvements
August 28th, 2006 - Posted in VoIPMinacom Labs today will release a study that claims VoIP phone service in North America has significantly improved during the past year, in contrast to a recent study by another VoIP testing outfit, Brix Networks, which claimed the opposite.
Minacom found just one out of 50 VoIP calls to be of unacceptable. Quality. While Minacom said this was in stark contrast to Brix’s study, it could also be argued that even a single unacceptable call in every 50 means the technology is not yet enterprise ready.
Brix’s study claimed one in five VoIP calls were of unacceptable quality, and that call quality was steadily declining.
The difference between the results, according to Minacom, was that Brix’s study was based on PC-to-PC VoIP services, similar to those provided by Skype, Google and Yahoo, whereas Minacom’s was based on VoIP offered by service providers using telecom-grade equipment.
The latter uses lower-compression codecs and is prioritized over regular Internet traffic using standards-based multimedia telephone adapters, or MTAs, Minacom said.
“PC-PC VoIP quality is subject to many diverse impairments, including firewall settings, computer performance, antivirus installations, high-compression codecs, and Internet bandwidth shared with gaming, file downloads, web surfing and email,” Minacom said, in a statement.
Minacom also said its study showed 85% of VoIP calls exceeded the quality of traditional phone calls. Indeed, the mean opinion score for VoIP scored 4.2 on average veruses 3.9 for traditional telephony, where a 5 score is the best possible, Minacom said.
“Wireline copper telephony is subject to long, aging wiring to residences, quantization distortion introduced by narrowband PCM codecs, and least-cost routing decisions which can result in quality issues,” said Minacom chief executive Michel Nadeau.
The study also claimed that VoIP calls connected quicker than traditional calls – 8.2 seconds on average compared to 8.9 seconds for calls placed within North America. International calls connected even faster with VoIP – 8.7 seconds versus 10.4 seconds with traditional telephony. Compared to the company’s similar study a year ago, VoIP connections have improved 2 seconds in the past 12 months.
The study was done with a standards-based, single-ended system that tested traditional telephone, managed broadband and cable VoIP lines. It was based on 14,000 test calls placed by Minacom’s PowerProbe 6000 to Western European and North American from July 2005 to July 2006.
Source: www.computerwire.com