Voice communications is a critical component of any business. Despite the emergence of other communications channels – all of which have created more opportunity for people to communicate using whatever medium is most appropriate in the moment – voice remains the standard for critical communications. Its real-time nature and ability to overcome ambiguity in text-based interactions makes it the only way to communicate in critical situations.
You certainly wouldn’t want air traffic management teams, for instance, to rely on email as they coordinate flight traffic. On the other hand, you also wouldn’t want them to suffer from poor call quality when handling any number of situations that can come up that impact flights. Reliable communications, including consistently high voice quality, is critical for the safe operations of all flight traffic, not only at individual airports, but across larger geographies.
To provide air traffic management (ATM) teams with reliable voice quality across their networks, Rohde & Schwartz has partnered with Voipfuture to release a new voice monitoring solution for air traffic management. The ATC Voice Quality Assurance solution provides air traffic service providers monitoring capabilities across signaling and media planes to ensure all voice traffic across these networks meets performance standards to ensure clear communication.
Voipfuture brings more than a decade of VoIP quality monitoring to the solution. Its Crystal quality assurance solution is a passive monitoring solution specifically designed for VoIP communications, and goes beyond the traditional MOS measurement, looking at the entire signaling and media streams across full call durations, providing aggregate views of call quality using timeslicing technology.
The solution is already deployed in a few ANSP networks, with typical use cases including monitoring quality and performance KPIs, and regular reporting of network quality to Civil Aviation Authorities. The solution also simplifies troubleshooting by identifying root causes in networks, including misconfigured routers and switches or faulty fibers.
The R&S AVQA solution is part of its broader CERTIUM Analysis solution, which includes test and measurement solutions for VoIP networks, radios, navigation and satellite, and is designed to provide a single-source solution to full lifecycle of an ATC system.
Voipfuture’s Dr. Michael Wallbaum believes strongly that his company’s timeslicing approach provides much better voice quality monitoring than traditional MOS scores, which only consider short call segments. Using timeslicing, Voipfuture develops what it calls a Good minute Ratio across calls or multiple calls, based on individual MOS scores for each time slice. For example, if 97 out of 100 time slices, each representing one minute, have MOS scores above 4.0, the GMR would be 97%.
The same calculations can be performed across any group of media streams based on call direction, specific time frames, geographies, interconnect partners, or any other parameters. This allows providers to dig into specifics of call quality issues to easily identify problem areas.
Dr. Wallbaum got into the specifics of timeslicing and how it enables better voice quality monitoring during a recent webinar,
How to improve VoIP Monitoring by adding Media KPIs. While the collaboration with R&S delivers a new voice quality solution specifically for the ATC industry, Voipfuture’s Crystal solution can help any CSP (
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Alert) get a better handle on voice quality. With so many options out there, risking business due to poor customer experience just isn’t an option. If you missed the live webinar, the on-demand version is available to
listen to at your convenience.
Edited by
Erik Linask
