We have deep knowledge of complex customer communication technologies—voice, video, mobile, chat, Web, IM, unified communications, IP technologies, VoIP, VoLTE, IMS, NGN, and more.
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.
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.
The basic procedure is accomplished by automating actual calls into the voice application server in a controlled manner and measuring the results at every stage. Isolating performance issues at the tested layer enables you to more easily discover the source of issues.
No matter how solid a communications system is when it’s first implemented, things tend to go wrong over time. As you add new technology, change settings, have increased voice or data volumes, and more, it becomes a requirement that you monitor your communications systems to ensure they run as expected.
Today we are seeing a great deal of activity as companies migrate from legacy to IP technologies, add new self-service menu options and update routing solutions to ensure people have fast access to the diverse set of information and agent services. Everyone is taking pains to train their staff on the new regulations and how each plan will best meet differing needs.