Ixia Tests for 1M VoIP Endpoints

Ixia has passed a milestone: It says its residential and business VoIP testing can now support one million SIP- and RTP-based endpoints per chassis.

“VoIP protocols and technology may be well understood, but there are a host of potential problems when a high number of calls are mixed with large volumes of data and video traffic,” said Anupam Sahai, vice president of marketing at Ixia. “We developed our [solutions] to emulate city-scale communities of real-world users – allowing our customers to discover and solve their device and network problems before their customers do.”

The new IxLoad Voice matches the capacity of modern media gateways thanks to the Acceleron-XP load module, which implements voice protocols with hardware.

IxLoad tests VoIP network components, including IP-based PBXs, softswitches, call managers, session border controllers and media gateways, using highly realistic scenarios involving multiple voice protocols, complex calling sequences and triple-play mixes of voice, video and data traffic. IxLoad’s subscriber modeling emulates user communities that vary in service usage and timing. The resulting ability to accurately predict live-network capacity allows service providers to correctly provision their networks.

“VoIP services have already been widely adopted by consumers and SOHOs, but we expect the next growth in adoption to come from SMBs.” said Matthias Machowinski, analyst at research firm Infonetics. “For them, service reliability and voice quality will be key buying criteria.”