SOPHIA-ANTIPOLIS, France -- At two events, one in Europe and one later this summer in the United States, manufacturers of VoIP gateways and terminals will have the opportunity to test their equipment in controlled and uniform IP network conditions. Manufacturers will learn about their equipment performance, compare the results to other implementations and derive hints for potential system optimization together with the speech quality testing experts. Anonymity is guaranteed.

The third VoIP Speech Quality Test Event (SQTE) organised by the Plugtests(tm) service of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) will take place in Herzogenrath, Germany from the 14th to the 25th June 2004.

This event will consist of single vendor tests and not interoperability tests between different manufactures.

HEAD acoustics GmbH, who will host the event, will perform the speech quality measurements using instrumental (objective) tests using the test program of the previous ETSI VoIP SQTE events as a reference, thus providing continuity and a set of tests that has been proven over time.

The tests will take account of all conversational quality aspects, i.e. during single talk as well as during the interaction of both subscribers. The test results will allow a state-of-the-art benchmark comparison of the VoIP equipment under test and will underline the importance of considering both end-to-end and mouth-to-ear scenarios. In addition, the results will help the participating manufacturers in their efforts to further optimize their products with regard to overall speech quality.

European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI)