VoIP Call Quality Issues

With new technologies being used in communications, why VoIP call quality remains an issue?

11:16 31 August 2017

With the advent of numerous innovative communication technologies, one would think that voice quality issues were a thing in the past. Sadly, they aren’t.

 

Nick Kephart, senior director of product management at ThousandEyes, which makes tools for monitoring network infrastructure, troubleshooting application delivery, and mapping Internet performance, explains: “Voice traffic is especially susceptible to latency and jitter, given the real-time nature of a conversation. Voice is a highly visible, critical service [on which] employees, customers, and executives are quick to notice performance problems. Yet, most monitoring products focus only on end-to-end call detail records [CDRs]. They overlook network details at a level sufficient to locate capacity issues, jitter, loss, latency, and DSCP (QoS) remarking. And as cloud-based UC and VoIP are adopted, the reliance on the Internet for end-to-end connectivity and service delivery will only make the shift in monitoring approach more critical.”

 

If voice quality performance is not acceptable, Kephart advises: When traffic traverses corporate networks or the Internet, understanding the cause of issues and where they are occurring will help remediate problems more quickly. Recourses can include making routing and connectivity changes, opening tickets with service providers or, in the long term, considering changes to architectures or the choice of service providers.