Measuring the IP Voice, Video Experience

The explosion in video and voice traffic over IP networks is testing those systems in novel ways, and test and measurement vendors are hurrying to release new products and new technologies to help service providers, and network gear makers, assure that users are actually getting the experiences they expect.

Many of these vendors, including market leaders Empirix, Tektronix, and Psytechnics, speak of moving “beyond quality of service (QoS)” in seeking to gauge what the actual user experience is like. Usually this entails finding ways to measure services at the edge of the network, rather than in the core. This week Empirix unveiled its new Hammer Edge product line, designed to emulate real-time user experiences and mimic real-world user behaviors to demonstrate how networks and devices perform under, you guessed it, real-world conditions.

Empirix products are designed for pre-deployment testing, when network services are still in the lab. Measuring the performance of live networks carrying diverse traffic loads is the province of U.K.-based Psytechnics, which specializes in using a range of audio signals such as echo, noise, clarity and “listening quality” to gauge how users actually experience IP voice service.

Supporting UC platforms from major vendors such as IBM Lotus and Microsoft, Psytechnics’ Experience Manager suite eschews the basic network performance metrics of quality of service for “quality of experience,” accurately reflecting the user’s real-time conversations. Psytechnics employs a similar set of indicators to measure the performance of video-over-IP services.

Enterprise customers in particular, as they migrate to fully IP-centric networks, are seeking “more business-relevant service-level agreements,” said Psytechnics VP of marketing, Joe Frost, as opposed to traditional SLAs that focus on network core parameters like server availability and response time.

"In real time, none of those are relevant to the phone call or video-conference call you’re making," pointed out Frost.

That’s also the goal of Richardson, Texas-based Tektronix, a maker of oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers that in April said it is acquiring Arantech, a Dublin, Ireland technology company that specializes in “customer experience management.”

To find out more about the work these companies are doing in this area, click here to read the entire, in-depth article or click on the source link below.