MONTREAL -- Minacom, the leading service-quality test automation supplier to telcos and cable MSOs, today introduced long-duration stress-testing for VoIP services, allowing service providers to test speech-quality with test calls up to 24 hours in duration. Similar to the way Bit Error Rate Testing (BERT) is used to validate the integrity of PSTN voice services, Minacom’s VoIP stress-testing helps operators detect long-term and transient speech-quality degradation.

VoIP quality has steadily improved over the past year, yet is still found to suffer several minutes into a call as jitter buffers in telephone adapters, session border controllers and media gateways fill to capacity and begin dropping voice packets. In addition, excessive network traffic can cause short-term VoIP quality problems when frequent routing changes result in delayed, lost, and out-of-order packets. Long-duration VoIP stress-testing is ideal for identifying these problematic issues, complementing the speed and efficiency of short-term tests commonly used for troubleshooting and automated monitoring. Stress-testing also facilitates VoIP installation, provisioning, and validation of peering networks used by telcos, cable MSOs and hosted VoIP providers.

An industry first, Minacom’s PESQ Advanced Test Agent for PowerProbe® service-level test probes provides standards-based speech-quality stress-testing from 2 minutes to 24 hours, reporting Mean Opinion Score (MOS), clipping, distortion, noise, packet transmission and speech power measurements every 15 seconds. Thresholds can be applied to minimum, maximum and averaged results to highlight call-quality degradation and provide alarms to existing fault-management systems. To accelerate troubleshooting, MOS can be graphed against o ther metrics such as packet loss and signal-to-noise ratio to correlate VoIP quality problems with their underlying service issues.

Covering the latest VoIP technology, a wideband codec version of the stress-test is also available, allowing providers to turn-up and monitor premium, business-grade VoIP services. In addition, a loopback version of the stress-test, compatible with telephone adapters and session border controllers, will permit testing to customer premises without requiring far-end probes.

“Minacom’s VoIP stress-testing gives VoIP providers a reference-based tool to monitor VoIP service-quality, similar to the way BERT is used to verify the performance of traditional wireline services,” explained Michel Nadeau, President & CEO of Minacom, “long-duration PESQ testing with integrated troubleshooting allows operators to detect and rectify quality degradation before it becomes subscriber affecting, helping them to deliver VoIP service that matches the five-9’s reliability of the PSTN.”

Minacom