To customers and users of VoIP, IPTV (News - Alert), and other multimedia services, quality of experience (QoE) is what really matters.

 

Service providers have traditionally focused on Quality of Service (QoS), which ensures that networks are healthy enough to transmit data reliably from source to destination.

 

QoS is still important, but users don’t care about what happens on the network; they care about what they see and hear. Are VoIP calls clear, or are they garbled or choppy? Is the video sharp and smooth, or does the image look “blocky” and freeze up?

 

These are among the factors that determine QoE. Users expect the quality of IP voice and video services to be comparable to traditional, toll-quality telephony and cable/satellite television broadcasts—and when QoE suffers, service providers quickly lose subscribers to “churn” and IT managers find themselves fielding employee complaints.

 

Unlike QoS, QoE is subjective, and thus harder to quantify. How can a service provider or network manager know what each user is hearing or seeing, and whether they’re satisfied or annoyed? In a competitive market, if you wait for customers to complain, it may already be too late.

 

Fortunately, Telchemy (News - Alert) offers a simple solution this complex problem with its VQmon software. VQmon is already the most widely-used performance monitoring technology for VoIP and IPTV, integrated into the IP phones, gateways, and IPTV set-top boxes, wireless handsets, routers, switches, probes/analyzers, and test equipment of more than 100 vendors worldwide.

 

As a multi-platform, multi-vendor technology, VQmon measures the quality of Voice over IP services and provides diagnostic data for problem resolution. VQmon/EP is designed for integration into endpoints such as IP phones and gateways. VQmon/SA is designed for use in stream analysis and is typically used as the core VoIP analysis software in analyzers, probes, routers, switches, and SLA monitors.

 

The VQmon algorithm calculates the effects of transient problems (burst packet loss) and recency on voice/video quality, and therefore can report more accurate quality scores than methods based solely on measuring overall rates of packet loss.

 

VQmon technology supports passive monitoring, active testing, and troubleshooting, giving service providers and network managers a 24x7 global view of service health and user QoE for every call and video session.