The quality of VoIP services was never much competition for the traditional telephony systems. However even this quality seems to have dropped off by about 5 percent in the last 18 months, according to a new study by Brix Networks, a company, which makes monitoring, tools for service providers.
The company used data gathered from its website called TestYourVoip.com, which it created two years ago. The test allows users to know exactly what quality is offered by their VoIP services. Around 1 million VoIP connections were tested through the website. Brix found that 20 percent of these had unacceptable quality. This figure is up from the 15 percent reported a year ago.
"From late 2004 through mid-2006, the test results generated by Test YourVoIP.com showed a consistent decrease in overall voice quality as calculated via a Mean Opinion Score (MOS), a common objective measure of conversational voice quality that rates calls on a scale from one (bad) to five (excellent). Test calls with a MOS of 3.6 or better are typically regarded as having satisfactory quality," the company said in a statement.
MOS is the international standard method that judges the quality of the telephone call as is in existence from before VoIP began to make waves. Kaynam Hedayat, vice president, engineering, and chief technology officer at Brix said he was very surprised by the test results. He added that over the last few years the number of VoIP subscribers had grown to 20 million, but the call quality appeared to have taken a dive. "For long-term sustainability, providers of Internet phone services will need to concentrate on the root causes of call quality degradation, including late packet discards, lost packets, and round-trip voice latency," he stressed.
Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at the Yankee Group agreed with him. He said service providers needed to prioritize their traffic. "The vision for many service providers is to offer video, Internet access and voice on one pipe. And the addition of video is going to be a huge hit on the network," he added. "I think consumers will be less tolerant with jittery TV than they have been with voice, so service providers better get the prioritization mechanisms in place today before they try to sell the public on Internet-based video."
