Empirix Inc., which helps organizations adopt complex communication solutions with confidence, announced the results of a survey conducted during Dec. 2005 on the topic of "Service Provider VoIP Deployment and Service Delivery Challenges." Highlights of the survey, which garnered 148 responses, include:

• Only one-fifth (20 percent) of respondents report using VoIP application monitoring systems to ensure service quality; and
• When asked how their network engineers most often initially find out about problems in the VoIP network, the dominant response (36 percent) was, "Subscriber complaints."

Overall conclusion: VoIP service providers can do more to ensure quality of service

Jessy F. Cavazos, Manager of the Communication Test Program at research firm Frost & Sullivan, found the survey results startling. "Waiting for subscribers to complain about service quality is clearly not a sustainable operations model for VoIP service providers," noted Cavazos. "To be successful, as service providers transition from service introduction to ramp to full deployment, they need to proactively monitor live traffic to gain insight into service quality and network behavior. We believe this will be a major growth area for the industry in 2006."

Media problems perceived to be more threatening than signaling problems

The survey also found VoIP service providers believe media quality problems pose the biggest threat to service quality today, and that threat will grow over the next two years. Further, respondents believed that signaling problems are lessening in severity and impact and will continue to do so over the next two years. Media quality refers to the quality of the media being conveyed over an IP pipe - for instance, audio quality for a voice call. Signaling quality refers to the efficiency, reliability and availability of call connections - for instance, call-completion rates and time to connect.

"The increasing concern with media quality is no surprise," says Empirix Vice President Phil Odence, who leads the company's VoIP monitoring business. "Any service provider offering VoIP is experiencing dramatic growth in their subscriber base which eventually stresses network bandwidth constraints."

Hammer XMS helps service providers rollout and manage VoIP services with confidence

To date, most VoIP monitoring solutions have focused on signaling quality. Only Empirix offers a solution that measures both media and signaling quality for live VoIP traffic.

Empirix's Hammer XMS is also the only monitoring system capable of directly measuring voice stream quality at carrier-class volumes. It is designed to deliver the diagnostic, analytic and reporting capabilities that large-scale VoIP deployments require, enabling service providers to confidently deliver the quality of service customers demand. Hammer XMS enables service providers to deploy new services faster, at lower cost and with higher quality. It also enables them to reduce customer churn by detecting and resolving problems faster, often before customers are affected. Hammer XMS provides objective data that can be used to track SLA compliance, and can help optimize network utilization.

Empirix has won numerous awards for Hammer XMS since its introduction, including the 2006 VoIP Product of the Year Award from Frost & Sullivan and a Product of the Year Award from Internet Telephony magazine. Three of the top six cable companies, including Cox Communications, are Hammer XMS customers.

Free survey summary available online

To download a free executive summary of the Empirix survey, visit www.empirix.com/spvoipsurvey. For more information on Empirix, visit www.empirix.com, call 1-866-EMPIRIX or email info@empirix.com.