VoIP Quality Study

I have been deluged with requests about this study. The last time I wrote about it I told you that Packet8 was the quality leader so far. I haven’t had a chance to read this as I am on my way to visit a number of VoIP companies today and am running late. Enjoy the release.

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·First Competitive Benchmark to Compare Quality of Internet Phone Services (VoIP) from End User Perspective

·Assesses VoIP Readiness in San Francisco and New York Markets

·Study Ranks Leading Internet Phone Service Providers on Every Major Performance Factor Affecting End User Experience

·AT&T CallVantage, Packet8, Primus Lingo, Skype, Verizon and Vonage Included in Study; Calls Carried Over T1 Networks Including AT&T, Sprint and UUNET and Residential DSL and Cable Networks

San Mateo, Calif., — May 11, 2005Keynote Systems (Nasdaq: KEYN), The Internet Performance Authority®, is launching a unique study to benchmark the service quality of the leading providers of Internet phone services; also known as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), as perceived by end users.

The study is the first of its kind designed to assess the market readiness of the leading Internet phone service providers by comparing the call quality of those VoIP providers in San Francisco and New York to traditional Public Switched Telephone Networks (PSTN). The study compares the quality of Internet phone service providers based on ten performance metrics to accurately benchmark typical scenarios including placing VoIP to VoIP calls from New York to San Francisco and back as well as calls from a VoIP-enabled phone to a traditional phone.

Additionally, the study ranks leading providers on every major factor that affects the end-user experience with Internet phone service, including service availability, audio delay and listening quality. The study also analyzes various diagnostic metrics that constitute the service performance factors and evaluates the impact of the underlying network carriers on the VoIP quality perceived by end-users.

The six leading VoIP providers included in the study are: AT&T CallVantage, Packet 8, Primus Lingo, Skype, Verizon and Vonage. To understand the impact of underlying network performance on call quality, the VoIP telephone calls are carried on three T1 networks: AT&T, Sprint, and UUNET. In addition to measuring underlying network performance, the study captures the impact of the last-mile on call quality by measuring each of the six providers on residential DSL and residential cable lines as well.

VoIP has emerged as an influential technology that promises to cut consumer phone bills and enterprise communications costs, and change the way we communicate. The Keynote rankings will help enterprises assess VoIP readiness for the major markets of New York and San Francisco and highlight market leadership among the various providers.

According to a recent report from Forrester, “One of the main attractions of managed VoIP for large businesses is the ability to support large numbers of mobile and remote workers on a single telecommunications system. Verticals with the highest proportions of telecommuting workers tended to express the greatest interest in managed VoIP. Companies in the business services sector, which have greater instances of telecommuting, expressed the highest interest in managed VoIP, with 42% reporting that they would use the services.”

The market for hosted IP voice services among US businesses is expected to reach nearly $60 million by the end of 2004,” according to IDC which projects a compound annual growth rate of 282% to reach $7.6 billion in 2008.

“With all of the market conditions in alignment, VoIP is finally poised to overtake and replace the aging but reliable circuit switched infrastructure. Much of the recent excitement over VoIP has focused upon relatively minor deployments to the consumer market, “ says William Stofega, senior research analyst, VoIP Services, IDC. “While not down playing the po
tential of the consumer, IDC believes that the business market is ripe for adoption of VoIP and the features and functionalities that it promises. Although VoIP in the consumer market has attracted most of the attention thus far, the business market is where the real money will made in the next five years.”

“The competition is fierce between phone companies and VoIP providers, and is only intensifying with cable companies and carriers coming into the fray this year,” said Dharmesh Thakker, senior product manager for Keynote service level management at Keynote. “Though other studies quantify the cost-savings of VoIP and associated service features, the key driver behind residential adoption is the dial-tone reliability and superior voice quality with minimum disruptions that consumers have come to expect with traditional telephone service. The highly-quantifiable Keynote VoIP study sheds light on how well VoIP providers stack up relative to traditional phone service, and who is providing the best quality of service for consumers in two large U.S. cities.”

How the Keynote VoIP Benchmark Study Works

Keynote is evaluating each of six VoIP providers over each of the five networks by placing coast-to-coast calls from VoIP to traditional telephones (PSTN) between San Francisco and New York once every 30 minutes. Additionally, local loop VoIP to PSTN calls are placed every 30 minutes for each of the provider and network combinations to emulate a contained environment and accurately track the network impact on call quality. Calls are also placed from and to traditional phones every 30 minutes between the two metro areas to understand what residential customers can expect when switching from traditional phone lines to VoIP.

To quantify the end-user experience with call quality over each VoIP provider and network combination, Keynote identified ten key performance factors based on multiple network and audio fidelity metrics that are collected during the call placement. These performance factors include: service availability, outage hours, average number of call attempts, dropped calls, audio delay (including consistency over time and geography), listening quality using perceptual evaluation of speech scale or PESQ to arrive at a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and MOS consistency over time and geography.

The study will also highlight the areas up-and-coming providers need to pay special attention to in order to provide high service quality to end-users and attract and retain enterprise customers in their respective markets. Moreover the data presented will help the enterprise understand industry best practices which can be implemented during their branch-office VoIP and converged customer care application deployments to maximize employee productivity and customer satisfaction.

About Keynote

Founded in 1995, Keynote Systems (Nasdaq “KEYN”), The Internet Performance Authority®, is the worldwide leader in e-business performance management services. Over 2,100 corporate IT and marketing departments and 16,000 individual subscribers rely on Keynote’s portfolio of measurement and monitoring, service level and customer experience management services to improve e-business performance by reducing costs, improving customer satisfaction and increasing profitability.

Keynote is viewed as The Internet Performance Authority due to the company’s global infrastructure of over 1,600 measurement computers in more than 50 cities worldwide that capture and store on a daily basis over 60 million Internet performance measurements, frequent media citations quoting Keynote’s Web performance data and analysis, the company’s market-leading Web performance indices for vertical markets and leading customer research that provides critical business insight into online customer experiences, industry trends and competitive Web strategies.

Keynote Systems, Inc. is headquartered in San Mateo, California and can be reached at www.keynote.com or by phone in the U.S. at 650-403-2400.

Keynote, The Internet Performance Authority and Perspective are registered trademarks of Keynote Systems, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. © 2005 Keynote Systems, Inc.

 

 

Internet Phone Service Quality Study Kicked Off by Keynote 

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