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Clear up VOIP call quality

The Sintrex VOIP monitor is designed to analyse VOIP call quality based on various network parameters, says Adrienne Kotz'e, product director of Sintrex.


Johannesburg, 26 Jan 2015
Adrienne Kotz'e, Product Director of Sintrex.
Adrienne Kotz'e, Product Director of Sintrex.

The myriad benefits of voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) calls, including the cost-effectiveness of it and the ability to provide companies with mobility, have become widely known in recent years and has become a major reason for budget-conscious companies to switch to it.

Yet, despite proven statistics that it can slash telephone bills by as much as 40% in South Africa, many local company owners are still reluctant to change to VOIP to meet their telecommunications needs. Why?

"The hesitation to change to VOIP is because of the widely held belief that voice communication delivered via the data network is less reliable, especially when compared to the traditional, circuit-switched public telephone network, which has made consumers used to voice calls of impeccable quality," says Adrienne Kotz'e, Product Director of Sintrex, an IT infrastructure management company.

"That's because VOIP is delivered over a best-effort network, without fundamental quality of service guarantees, and network routers handle traffic on a first-come, first-served basis. Therefore, routers on high-volume traffic links may cause delays that exceed permissible thresholds for VOIP. And VOIP does not provide a network-based mechanism to ensure that data packets are not lost, and are delivered in sequential order. And many companies are not willing to sacrifice quality when it comes to their business calls."

Kotz'e says although the quality of VOIP calls has improved drastically over the years, there are still issues that might affect the quality of calls. "The amount of bandwidth you have at your disposal will affect the quality of the calls you have on VOIP," he explains. "Those who have a slow Internet connection will have really bad VOIP calls, with it breaking up constantly. Other aspects that might affect calls include the equipment you use, the location of your hardware (if it's situated too close together, you might experience interference, which will leads to call quality issues), and even the weather - with thunderstorms, wind and other conditions causing static. Sometimes fixed delays are caused by the physical distance the packets have to travel - and that is something that cannot be controlled."

However, Kotz'e says there is one way in which to take control over the other aspects to ensure the quality of your VOIP calls is on par with that of voice calls. "Sintrex has a VOIP monitor, which is a specialised network packet sniffer. Packet sniffing basically means capturing packets and examining their contents," Kotz'e explains. "It is a good way of identifying and understanding some problems once they occur on the network."

The Sintrex VOIP monitor is a network packet sniffer for SIP (session initiation protocol) and RTP (real-time transport protocol). SIP is a signalling communications protocol widely used for controlling multimedia communication sessions such as voice and video calls over Internet Protocol networks, while RTP defines a standardised packet format for delivering audio and video over Internet Protocol networks.

"The Sintrex VOIP monitor is specifically designed to analyse VOIP call quality based on various network parameters," Kotz'e says. "Calls with all the relevant statistics are saved to a database for further analysis. The VOIP monitor can also decode speech and playback via a Web GUI, an open source content management system with various built-in features, including message boards. The benefits include the ability to capture thousands of simultaneous calls and perform real-time SIP/RTP analysis on it."

Kotz'e concludes that with all the cost-saving benefits VOIP has to offer, investing in the monitor to ensure optimum call quality is a small price to pay.

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Mia Andric
Exposure
mia@exposureunlimited.net