Empirix Offers Insights on VoIP Peering

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

TMC's (News - Alert) Stefania Viscusi recently had an opportunity to speak with Dan Teichman, director of product marketing for the Service Assurance Group at Empirix (News - Alert), a vendor of VoIP monitoring products. The discussion focused on VoIP peering.

Asked what role monitoring plays in the big picture here, Teichman said it's a tool, "a way organizations and the service provider can conduct their business more  also is valuable for network engineering, network planners, "even the front office, which is customer service and marketing."

Monitoring also has positive implications for business growth, for the positive effects on VoIP quality itself, as well as a service provider's brand. "Monitoring can most importantly provide proactive visibility into network and service behavior," he noted.

For instance, Teichman said, "if you're providing the ability to understand the voice quality to a specific peering partner, that would be something of extreme value to an operations person, who could either look at a bird's eye view of the entire ecosystem, or drill down into details of specific traffic flows."

Understanding overall traffic patterns and determining how to handle network growth, monitoring products can provide that kind of detailed information as well, he said, adding that "customer care groups can use the information so that they can manage the customer relationships, which is especially crucial when, as we know, so many customers can easily switch to alternate service providers."

Addressing the issue of how important this is with more service bundles and real-time services becoming the popular choice, Teichman said that proactive management of service quality is going to be "critical. It seems obvious to me that waiting for a customer to complain about service quality is not going to be a sustainable business model, especially when the presumption here is that consumer and business acceptance of VoIP is going to be key to the service bundle's success, and service quality is obviously a major differentiator."

(source: http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/voip-monitoring/articles/85469-empirix-offers-insights-voip-peering.htm)