Benjamin Ellis, vice president of marketing at Psytechnics Ltd., a voice technology test and measurement firm in Ipswich, England, contends that IT looks at the problem incorrectly when it just analyzes the IP part of the VOIP equation. "Using IP tools to measure a system doesn't tell you about the voice bits that determine voice quality," he says. For example, losing 10 percent of a session's packets may not affect a call's MOS results. But losing a different 10 percent of the packets could make the call unbearable.
Ellis says you need to go beyond the usual IP metrics of jitter and packet loss and focus on session-layer data that better shows the characteristics of a voice call. When you sign up your company for a VOIP service, he says, demand metrics based on perceptual evaluation of speech quality, a standard developed by Psytechnics, BT Group PLC and other companies, under the auspices of the International Telecommunication Union. For more information, go to www.pesq.org.
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... in the world of IT? Well, how about a bilingual personalized 511 service? If you live in an urban region of the U.S. that offers 511 traffic reports, you know how they can help your company's mobile staffers get around. Residents of some cities in North Carolina and Florida will soon be able to sign up for an English or Spanish "concierge service" that will call you if your stored profile indicates you could encounter traffic problems, says Fred Korangy, CEO of LogicTree Corp. in Bowie, Md. His company's Extreme Recognition Framework recognizes which language you're using and offers information accordingly.
Korangy explains that the 511 service gets real-time feeds of traffic conditions directly from highway sensors and other reports and then translates the data for callers. He says the system is tuned to interpret calls received on lousy cell phone (and maybe VOIP) connections. The free concierge service is scheduled to go live in September.