[July 25, 2005] Brix Intros Customer Care App for VoIP Providers Tweet BY JOHANNE TORRES TMCnet VoIP Minute Watch Columnist VoIP technology provider Brix Networks of Chelmsford, MA introduced today the BrixCare Self-Service, a new VoIP quality measurement and reporting application for VoIP service providers. According to the company’s news announcement released today, the new application was designed to “measure VoIP quality from the customer premises, and enable providers to launch, operate, and assure their residential and business broadband voice services.” The new application is comprised of the following three components: • An on-demand VoIP Agent: A digitally signed, lightweight Java applet that is downloaded to a subscriber's PC, either in self-service mode or at the direction of a customer service representative. • Central Management Software: A platform that collects information and presents it in audience-appropriate formats that is actionable and relevant to customer service reps, NOC engineers, and management. • And the Brix Verifiers: Hardware appliances that reside in the provider’s network for terminating test calls and measuring VoIP call quality. "Most VoIP providers have minimal visibility into their customers' environments or access networks where quality issues often arise," said Laura Holly, product line manager at Brix Networks. "BrixCare Self-Service allows both users and providers to quickly determine whether a problem originates in the user's environment, the ISP's network, or the VoIP provider's service delivery infrastructure. Our customers have told us that by using BrixCare Self-Service they have realized significant reductions in the average handle times of calls to their support reps in the vicinity of 30 to 40 percent." The news release explained that the BrixCare Self-Service can be used as a pre and post-sign-up app. Providers can use the new app within the pre-sign-up stage to identify users with poor broadband quality as a demo of service quality for prospective customers. At post-sign-up stage, providers could use the new app in order to avoid expensive customer service calls by enabling users to diagnose and resolve problems by accessing a self-help portal. In that situation, the BrixCare Self-Service would cause call length reduction and increased resolution of problems by enabling representatives to more quickly confirm and resolve or appropriately escalate user-reported problems. New app tests signaling quality metrics including the time for each call setup phase and complete call setup time, and also provides a host of delivery quality diagnostic metrics, such as latency, packet loss, and jitter. The application also reports a bi-directional Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and analyzes the impact of each quality factor on MOS degradation. The BrixCare Self-Service also measures overall call quality using the E-Model (ITU-T G.107) standard. According to a study conducted by the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering of Carleton University in Canada, “the E-model assesses the combined effects of varying transmission parameters that affect the conversation quality of narrow band telephony. A BrixCare Self-Service Starter Kit, which includes a Brix 1000 Verifier, Advanced VoIP Test Suite (SIP), Self-Service Application, and related licenses, is currently available with a hefty price tag of $65,000. Today’s news follows Brix’s recently announced partnership with PRIMUS Telecommunications Canada Inc., a telecom carrier and ISP in Canada last month. PRIMUS tapped Brix for its service assurance products to measure and verify the quality of the telecom’s TalkBroadband Internet telephony service. PRIMUS Canada will initially deploy the Brix VoIP PreQual Application as part of its recently introduced, free Web portal My TalkBroadband, which lets customers manage their calls and various business and residential service features online. Brix Networks http://www.brixnet.com ----- Johanne Torres is contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more articles by Johanne Torres, please visit: http://www.tmcnet.com/tmcnet/columnists/columnist.aspx?id=100006&nm=Johanne% 20Torres [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]