It should come as no surprise that a company with a name Psytechnics is a strong engineering company. This is certainly not a marketing company with hollow technology under the covers, these guys really know their stuff and in this case the stuff is VoIP quality. A spin-off of BT, the research division went off on its own to strike it rich.

The company makes its living checking to see how jitter and latency are perceived by our ears. You know those MOS (mean opinion scores) ratings that tell us how good voice sounds? Psytechnics has algorithms they constantly tune, that enable equipment makers to determine how good their VoIP quality is. The company has further authored a variety of ITU standards that are beyond the scope of this blog entry.

Service providers are embracing the company’s technology as in many cases sound quality is acceptable when typical MOS ratings would cry wolf. By integrating their technology, Psytechnics allows service providers to get credit for good calls and minimize chargebacks from calls incorrectly classified as below a quality threshold.

Is all this important? You bet. Quality of sound is something that we need to worry about as an industry and companies like Psytechnics are helping companies accurately measure sound quality so we can properly charge for and deliver VoIP service.