Voice Management

In an effort to further delve into topics pertinent to the voice management and communications technologies industry, Tone Software (News - Alert) has created “The Tone Convergence Community”— an online blog dedicated to discussions about these issues.

For the first blog, the voice management company took a stab at a pressing question that has gotten a lot of attention over the past few years, “Why is Mean Opinion Score (MOS) so easily dismissed?”

In the blog, Tone Software’s Director of Strategic Technology Advancement Amit Kapoor explores whether audience expertise has surpassed the oversimplified value of MOS; whether has MOS outgrown its value in how we operate our VoIP networks; and whether there something more subtle creating the perception of dismissal.

According to Kapoor, MOS originated from the need to “demystify the complex impairments that affect conversations and provide a user perception for voice quality.”

“Measuring analog voice conversations include impairments such as noise, echo, distortion, signal-to-noise ratio, etc,” Kapoor writes. “Simplifying the voice quality to a scale between 1 and 5 allowed providers and consumers to identify if an impairment exceeded thresholds that could manifest in an acoustic perceivable impairment.”

With the inception of VoIP, MOS began to play an even more pivotal role in determining whether VoIP Quality of Service (QoS) was similar or surpassed analog voice quality. VoIP QoS measurements account for packetized impairments such as packet loss, jitter and delays, however, the acoustic perception of a MOS=3.5 (for example) voice quality should be similar between analog and VoIP, according to Kapoor.

Currently, with VoIP becoming more ubiquitous in the enterprises network, the comparison to analog circuit is no longer required. Conversely, now it is more important to have access to all the raw impairments when managing the VoIP network and too-often focus on the peaks/valleys of impairments as the key driver in managing VoIP QoS, according to Kapoor.

“As a fellow technology enthusiast, I understand the need to analyze and operate the VoIP network using the variances in the individual impairments, however I also see merit in utilizing MOS scores,” Kapoor writes. “When attempting to quantify the overall status of user experiences within the VoIP network, utilizing MOS provides a quick management performance indicator.”

“When determining the expected VoIP QoS between codec variances, MOS once again creates the necessary differentiation to determine the acceptable impairments for each codec utilized,” he added. “Lastly, MOS helps to establish a baseline of acceptable VoIP QoS within the network and aids to discover any variances when network conditions change such as load or device firmware.”

So is MOS so easily dismissed?

According to Kapoor, MOS still has a place within the operational processes of the VoIP network but we must adapt our usage when maintaining VoIP services.

To read Kapoor’s blog, please click here.