September 09, 2007, 9:01 PM — Listen to the column Cleaner VoIP, or visit our Podcast Center to hear more by James Gaskin.
When a Voice over Internet Protocol user complains about a poor
connection, what do you do? Most check the network for dropped packets
or other errors, find no problems, and tell the user to stop mumbling.
Enter Psytechnics (.com), a company dedicated to measuring responses of
both packets and the people relying on those packets for their
conversations. It doesn't matter if the packets are happy if the users
aren't.
In fact, Psytechnics specializes in what they call QoE, or Quality of
Experience. Their name comes from mashing psychology and technology
together, and they measure both.
Mike Hollier, CTO of Psytechnics and the man pushing the development of
this area since before Psytechnics spun off from British Telecom in
2000, says, "IP QoS tools have grown up looking at performance of the IP
network, treating VoIP like data. They don't look into the real time
data streams between endpoints to measure problems within the voice
call. Echo, noise, speech levels, distortion, line level settings, and
other problems reduce the quality of the experience even when the IP
network shows all green lights."
Sometimes IP issues cause the problem, but often endpoints and
voice-specific details need fixing. Simple configuration issues on the
PSTN gateways, hiss from pads, or mismatched headsets don't show up in
IP measurements but do appear when Psytechnics' deep packet inspection
shows the actual waveform. When you view the conversation wave form and
see noise and distortion, you know the user experience suffers.
"I spent 10 years and millions of pounds of BT's money learning to
measure signals and judge QoS standards," says Hollier. Early on they
were called to put out fires in VoIP deployments with problems. Now
they're getting called by some customers during the design phase.
Psytechnics sells Experience Manager software that runs on vanilla Linux
hardware and monitors connections. The Experience Server aggregates
information from multiple feeds and end points and can plug into your
high end management system.
Pricing varies, with a few installations in the tens of thousands of
dollars, a few in the millions, and most in the hundreds of thousands.
But when you're rolling VoIP from 10 locations to 2000, the ability to
monitor and guarantee user experience for pennies on the project dollar
makes great sense. You'll be able to hear "well done" loud and clear.
