The consumer VoIP market has been getting so competitive lately many providers are competing on price alone. They believe they will be able to undercut Vonage and last forever. They believe the margin is big enough for them to live in for quite some time.

 

A more likely scenario is many of the thousands of Vonage (News - Alert) competitors worldwide will get squeezed. As they get squeezed there is a chance their quality will not keep up with other service providers who have the money to spend on keeping their call quality as good as it can be.

As quality erodes or just doesn’t keep up, customers will look for alternative providers to give them the service they demand. In addition, business customers will see the poor service being provided by some consumer providers and will likely be very careful about selecting a VoIP carrier for the enterprise. We can expect more enterprise customers to push their service providers to guarantee quality levels, in fact. This is a given as time goes on.

Many service providers have decided that the consumer VoIP market doesn’t have a long-term future and have instead set their sights on the business market. But how do these service providers differentiate themselves? One of the answers is by providing superior and measurable quality levels.

The mean opinion or MOS score has been around for many years and is a generally accepted way to measure call quality on a per phone call basis. But what is the best method to measure calls on a large scale?

Viola Networks believes they have the answer to this question and their method is the Service Level Index or SLI. This method the company believes is vastly superior to simply averaging metrics, because the SLI method allows you to determine how many calls are bad—even if the average MOS score is within an acceptable range.

 

You see, many calls are deemed unacceptable, but this data can be hidden from view if you don't use a formula like SLI.

Viola’s SLI method will take you back to high school math class, but it isn’t too complicated. The number is calculated by taking the ratio of the number of bad calls (BC) over the total calls (TC). This gives you a ratio of BC/TC.

 

So, if 20 out of 100 calls are bad you get a ratio of 2/10 or 0.2. Now, to get the number of good calls we need the inverse of this number. To do this we subtract (BC/TC) from 1 and in this case 1-0.2 = us 0.8. This number is now multiplied by 100 to give us 80 which gives us the total number of good calls we had in the first place. The formula looks like this SLI = (1-BC/TC)*100.

Bad calls are determined as an index threshold. Let’s take a MOS score of 3.7, for example. The SLI period can be a day, week, anything you decide. In reality these numbers would be agreed upon by a service provider and enterprise.

Another factor to consider is the service area—such as calls from New York to San Diego or New York to Iceland.

I had a chance to speak about with Viola Network's Dave Zwicker and he told me his company has released the NetAlly Lifecycle Manager 5.1 and the Hardware Traffic Agent (HTA), a bundled appliance for remote office locations that includes a NetAlly software agent and the hardware for $1,200.

 

The HTA appliance is offered at an introductory price until the end of the year (please check with the company for details). The appliance enables service providers and others to deploy a small, inexpensive VoIP assessment, monitoring and diagnostic device at the customer premises, while managing the HTAs from a central NOC. In case you missed the recent news, Inter-tel recently announced it is using NetAlly solutions.

Also included in the NetAlly 5.1 release are new service level management reports that help to document and streamline the deployment process for IP telephony systems. The software automatically discovers the network devices and IP-PBX (News - Alert) equipment that make up the VoIP infrastructure.

 

This includes vendor, model number, serial number, revision level and network address information which are gathered and consolidated into a single report providing a snapshot of the original deployment. Changes to this configuration are detected and posted in exception reports so that deployment personnel can manage equipment more effectively and solve problems more rapidly.

Dave told me some other interesting things about there software like its ability to see if devices are registered to a PBX or not connected at all. It can also tell if it has moved location.

In short, the company is helping the world of IP communications have better quality. By being able to give tangible quality reporting network managers and service providers can get a grip on how the quality level is throughout the enterprise. The ability to inventory VoIP equipment and help diagnose products can be an essential part of any medium-to-large VoIP install.

VoIP quality is a journey, not a destination. In order to ensure your IP communications infrastructure is allowing the best quality calls at all times you must manage your networks effectively and ensure you know what to do if service levels dip below the proper level. One of the best places in the world to learn about IP communications quality is Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO taking place this week at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California.