A few months ago, I received a direct message on LinkedIn from a member organization. They were interested in knowing if I was still in the VoIP troubleshooting business? If so, they wanted to know if I could help and provide any best practice recommendations.
Empirix and MetTel will join forces to provide end-to-end visibility for the MetTel cloud network to improve the communications experience of voice customers.
The “QoE Index” estimates end user perception of any service. Today we proudly announced that our innovative new approach to scoring Quality of Experience (QoE) across telecommunication services has been granted a US patent.
OGS selected the Empirix service assurance monitoring solution to gain visibility into the international connections providing carriers with access to its voice (both legacy circuit-switched and VoIP) and 2G/3G roaming services. With Empirix, OGS has uninterrupted visibility of network performance and service quality, as well as the ability proactively identify potential issues before they negatively impact customers. This flexible solution is capable of adapting to new technologies and innovative new services; OGS plans to extend the Empirix solution’s coverage to a recently announced LTE roaming service.
Empirix has developed a first-of-its-kind conference bridge monitoring solution – Empirix Conference Bridge Monitoring (CBM) – which monitors conference bridges to proactively ensure high-quality connections for business-critical conference calls.
Since the introduction of VoIP, the service or underlying technology (based on the SIP protocol) has been susceptible to multiple fraud scenarios. In particular, by exploiting some of the features of VoIP, such as three way call and call transfer, hackers can inject call signals into the network and effectively hijack calls. The result is significant non-billable revenue for the Service Provider. Since commands associated with VoIP technology are often sent un-encrypted and without authorization for each command, this is an easy technique to carry out.
For both fixed and mobile service providers, maximizing the effective use of network capacity is becoming key to increasing revenues and assuring the quality of experience for customers.
In one recent test Empirix was involved with, callers were complaining about long connection times and poor voice quality during a storm. The company involved conducted a test of its SBC to better understand the origin of the issue. During the test process, the organization discovered that, while having a registration flood of 10,000 concurrent SIP registrations, SIP call setup time doubled. Moreover, jitter increased on the SBC.
PESQ is a testing and monitoring related acronym that stands for Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality. Typically pronounced “pesk,” it is used as a means for automating the assessment of speech quality in communications networks (Unified Communications, VoIP, etc.).
In the world of communications systems testing and monitoring, MOS is an acronym for Mean Opinion Score. A MOS is used to evaluate and characterize the transmission characteristics of a telecommunications system.