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Keynote: VoIP audio "merely tolerable"
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Releasing its sixth study on VoIP service providers in three years, Keynote Competitive Research (KCR) says audio quality hasn't improved since the last go-round in April 2007. Reliability, however, is improving.
KCR, the industry analysis group of Keynote Systems, measured a mix of nine voice services -- landline service provider AT&T; VoIP providers AT&T CallVantage, Lingo, Packet8, EarthLink, trueVoice, Verizon's VoiceWing and Vonage; and cable Comcast Digital Voice and Time Warner Digital Phone services.
Findings of the study indicate that digital providers are outpacing the competition with audio quality, an interesting finding where VoIP audio is deemed as "merely tolerable" and a shift from the previous study where landline providers prevailed. In the published rankings, Comcast Digital Voice scored 901 performance points, followed by Verizon's VoiceWing service at 609 points and AT&T's land line service at 506 points.
Only one of the VoIP providers in the study failed to provide dial done 99.9 percent of the time or better and there's also one VoIP provider out there that requires two seconds more to set up a call than anyone else.
Eight out of the nine providers have improved their call completion rates since the previous study.
For reliability, AT&T landline line service ranks at number 1 with 996 points, but Time Warner Digital Phone pulled 926 points, followed by Verizon's VoiceWing service at 872 points.
For more:
- Visit Keynote's website for the press release.
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Comments
Posted by Anonymous | November 11, 2008 - 12:24pm
Doesn't the VOIP gateway provide the dial tone in most cases? This means that you would hear a dial tone the instant you lift the receiver - even if your Internet connection went down. I know this happens with my SIP-based VOIP gateway. Because of this, they shouldn't bother rating this point.
Posted by April Turner | November 18, 2008 - 8:47pm
Whether or not you get dial tone from the gateway is dependent on the ATA hardware and whether or not that ATA is in communications with its service provider. At Keynote, we measure the entire phone call from the end user perspective, including the behavior of the ATA, and every single one of the providers in the study has had some "no dial tone" errors at some point in the study. Separately considering whether or not one gets dial tone from whether or not the call completes is something that major carriers take action on seperately. There is no one activity to cure both problems, so we seperate them in the data to help target improvements.
Posted by hff135 | November 27, 2008 - 9:00pm
Take a look at VoIP Spear (www.voipspear.com) if you're interested in VoIP QoS. VoIP Spear is a web service that you can use to monitor your Internet for VoIP quality. It calculates a MOS score between 1 (very poor) and 5 (excellent quality) based on your connection's packet loss, jitter, and latency. It presents this information to you in a series of charts that you can use to see what your VoIP QoS has been like over a day, week, or whatever.
VoIP Spear can also send you email alerts when your VoIP quality drops too low.
VoIP Spear is free for personal use.
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