You can’t measure the quality of a VoIP call without having a set of metrics. While traditional TCP application performance metrics – like transaction time and throughput – are important, they may be difficult to relate to the user experience with the VoIP phone system. There are some user experience metrics that relate directly with [...]

It’s important to understand each call setup protocol in a VoIP system, because each different call type can involve different components and different protocols. First, there is On-Net calling, which takes place between two IP phones on the same logical network. In this scenario, the phones use setup protocols like SIP or SCCP to interact [...]

Often when looking at VoIP quality, people focus on what happens after your call goes through – crackles, drop-outs, and delay aren’t fun, but they’re only half of what you need to worry about with VoIP rollouts. The VoIP experience begins not with “Hello” but with “eeeeeeeeeeeee.” It begins when you pick up the handset [...]

The underlying network metrics that affect VoIP call quality are packet loss, jitter, and latency, and if you have good network performance for traditional networked applications, it is not a guarantee that performance will be good for VoIP applications. The real-time characteristics of voice create very strict requirements for network performance. For example, an inappropriately [...]

Anytime you add a new application to the network, unexpected results (if not outright chaos on the order of the fall of the tower of Babel) often ensue. VoIP is no different and can affect network performance particularly. This is why efficient VoIP management is so important. Most traditional networked application performance – email, ERP, [...]