Top Five Reasons to Invest in VoIP Quality Monitoring

VoIP quality monitoring has provided enormous value to customer service, network operations, engineering, planning, and even marketing departments within Service Provider organizations.

The top five reasons listed below highlight specific areas in which quantifiable savings are typically achieved, demonstrating why an investment in VoIP quality monitoring is a smart business decision.

1. Know the quality of your VoIP service before your customers do

Waiting for customers to report troubles means you have already lost the opportunity to meet, or exceed, their service quality expectations. VoIP quality monitoring enables you to be proactive. Every trend you detect and every problem you avoid means you do not have to “make it up” to the customer for not delivering the quality of service they demand.

This is the essence of customer satisfaction, yet you can quantify this value in terms of the savings in network operations costs. For example, it is not uncommon for VoIP monitoring systems to reduce the number of trouble tickets an organization manages by 30 - 50%*. Every problem avoided is one that does not require you to spend time, money and resources to solve.

2. Be quick and efficient when you have to be reactive

It is not always possible to proactively prevent service problems, network degradation, and outages. Therefore, troubleshooting efficiency and effectiveness are especially critical when these problems occur. VoIP quality monitoring tools enable you to quickly identify, isolate, and resolve issues, minimizing the problem period and your staff time.

Without the right tools, diagnosing network and service issues is often a slow and tedious process that involves reviewing countless pages of network element log messages and manually trying to correlate information from different element management systems. VoIP quality tools automate this process and provide advanced correlation and debugging features that are not possible or practical to conduct manually. These tools can provide a wide range of capabilities, including detailed packet and protocol analysis all the way up to network-wide call and media statistics for performance measurement. You can also incorporate quality metrics from the customer premise to provide a comprehensive view of service quality.

Making the right information available for the right task as quickly as possible means your VoIP quality monitoring solution can provide up to a 75% reduction in trouble ticket time* (from problem identification, through resolution, to verification of the corrected situation).

3. Cannot effectively scale your VoIP service without it

How well are you handling your current traffic load? How much more can your network scale in its current configuration? When will you need to purchase more equipment? These are questions network engineering and planning organizations need to answer in order to scale VoIP service without complications. VoIP quality monitoring tools provide the information needed to accurately assess your network and plan for the future.

Most service providers do not have the luxury of building a new network for millions of subscribers before the first subscriber is activated. Instead, networks are built in stages and upgraded to accommodate additional users over time. Unfortunately the information requirements, operational processes, and workarounds used when you have a few thousand subscribers do NOT scale to millions of subscribers. Understanding when and what upgrades are required is critical to optimizing capital investments and the processes that accompany them.

For example, imagine a situation in which you expect to significantly grow your network subscriber base, but are unsure if your media gateway(s) are capable of handling the increase in traffic without trunk overload conditions. Without network traffic and performance metrics provided by VoIP quality monitoring, you will not be able to determine if they are adequately sized, until you have network connectivity problems and customers experience a degradation of service quality. At this point, you may be forced to conduct emergency equipment upgrades.

4. Avoid getting caught in the “blame” game

Today’s VoIP networks are often comprised of many different connected peer networks with many different infrastructure vendors. When problems occur between these networks and between different vendors it is easy to blame the other guy, especially when you have limited objective information. Your network partners and vendors must then conduct their own investigation which then results in them blaming another vendor, another network, or you. The problem is then passed over and the cycle starts all over again.

In reality, many of today’s problems may have more than one root cause and many parties must get involved to correct the issue. VoIP quality monitoring enables you to avoid the time-wasting blame game by providing clear, simple, and definitive information that is network and vendor agnostic.

This information can be shared among your network peers allowing them to collaborate in the problem resolution, helping them to be partners instead of your enemies. Likewise, VoIP monitoring provides valuable information for dealing with your suppliers on network service issues, thereby giving them the ability to help you more effectively.

5. Accurate VoIP quality metrics are a competitive differentiator

As described in the points above, VoIP quality metrics provide tremendous value – value that can separate you from your competitors.

The value of VoIP quality metrics increases with their accuracy and usability. Complex services are often the key differentiator that separates you from your competitors. However, obtaining truly accurate metrics is difficult, particularly for complex call flows that involve multiple calling parties, services, network segments, protocols, and/or transcoding schemes. With the right monitoring tools you can confidently provide these valuable, yet highly complex services.

VoIP quality information can also directly benefit your customers and interconnection partners’ bottom line by providing them with data that can help them optimize and troubleshoot their own network infrastructure. It is even possible to provide a secure portal for customers and partners to remotely access this information. Some operators may even choose to charge extra for this capability, turning monitoring services into an actual income, or offer this as a pro-bono capability to increase customer satisfaction.

The Verscom VoIP Quality Monitoring Solution

Verscom's wide range of testing and monitoring solutions are designed to ensure the quality and performance of VoIP and IMS products, services, networks throughout the entire development and deployment life cycle.

Our testing solutions simulate users and emulate devices interacting with voice-centric applications; which includes making calls, verifying features, measuring voice quality, and determining performance, as well as proving system and multi-vendor interoperability of VoIP, NGN and IMS architectures.

Verscom carrier-class monitoring solutions provide complete visualization into real-time service quality in a VoIP / IMS network. Synthesizing a wide range of critical operations data--from real-time metrics on network performance, to extensive signaling and media metrics on every call, to detailed decodes of per call messages -- makes our offering a valuable asset across multiple groups within a service provider organization.

When used by network operations, network engineering and customer support organizations, Verscom monitoring portfolio:

• Enhances pro-active efforts to avoid service quality problems before customer’s quality of experience is impacted by detecting negative trends in quality metrics, alerting on pre-set thresholds, and scheduled testing for verification of service quality;
  
  
• Increases the efficiency of reactive measures undertaken to respond to network or service issues by providing real-time analysis and diagnostics for root cause identification to minimize ticket handling time, and verification of remediation steps;
  
  
• Optimizes searching and diagnostic analysis on the large volumes of information gathered by VoIP, NGN, IMS monitoring through intelligent database indexing and integrated call ladder visualization of messages per call / session messages;
  
  
• Provides flexibility of access through different Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) appropriate to user skill level