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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 and get a dial tone. The quality of experience of the overall phone systems is shaped not only by the quality of the voice on the other end, but also the availability that the system provides.
Or in short: Users expect a dial tone every time they pick up the phone, and they expect every call to connect successfully and within a reasonable amount of time.
If you pick up the phone and don’t receive a dial tone within several seconds, then you’ll likely hang up thinking the phone system is broken. If you dial a phone number and you don’t hear ringing or busy signal within several seconds, then your experience is that you can’t make calls. If the call fails to connect and you hear a fast busy signal, then you’ll likely think that the call did not go through and you’ll have to try again. All of these experiences – getting a dial tone, connecting the call, ringing the other party, are all dependent on the performance of the call setup protocols in a VoIP system.
Now, plain ol’ telephone service (POTS) had shaped our expectations for call setup performance, and call setup time has decreased over the past 80 years. In 1923, for example, it took four minutes to connect a phone call! In living memory, it still took about 11 seconds to make a phone call – in 1978.
However by 1998, making a phone call took less than two and a half seconds, and the thing about telephones is that people generally know what to expect from the mature technology. If VoIP can’t meet it or beat the quality under the old service, they’re going to be ticked off.
Now, this level of call setup performance can be obtained, but it takes a great deal of attention and management.
We’ll speak more about the performance characteristics of Call Setup Protocols in our next post.
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