The Next Level - VoIP User Quality Management (Cont'd)

The fact is today, traditional phone service works quite well and for users to want to switch to a new service it must be compelling. The compelling story includes a lower price, more features and guaranteed quality of service. If the quality of service fails to meet expectations, i.e. what a user is accustomed to on a traditional land line, the user will simply switch services. Since QoS is critical and the final point in the network today is the phone in the customer’s hand, what better place to monitor voice quality?

How are other service providers enhancing the customer experience today?
Generally, most services are deployed and then service management follows. Service providers are quite aware of what is at risk and the issues associated with IP-based services. Issues such as jitter, latency and packet loss can wreak havoc on IP services. Because of this, more emphasis is being placed on management and quality of service.

One way providers today are trying to enhance the customer experience is by using testing and diagnostic tools to measure the quality of service. Typically, this is accomplished by intrusively “testing” the network by forcing a call through to monitor the quality. This may also be referred to as “active monitoring” and placing synthetic calls across a network to generate periodic and on-demand calls. A number of vendors have monitoring tools available today, and most are evolving these technologies to work even better.

While these methods are quite useful, they do not tell you what level of service the customer is actually experiencing on the handset. An even better way is to leverage technology which allows actual monitoring of user calls, or at least a representation of them – this is generally called “passive monitoring” – at the customer level.

Achieving User Quality Management
Unlike other monitoring solutions, UQM provides a ‘user view of the network’ not a ‘network view of the user.’ This is an important distinction, for everything may look good on the network meanwhile, users are experiencing poor voice quality. Monitoring the user experience also means that the phone or the customer premises equipment (CPE) is the last part of the network.

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