What is voice quality?
Getting back to the topic of voice or/and speech quality testing (especially in VoIP) it would be good to have a clear understanding what is that quality we are talking about?
Typically voice quality in a network would suffer from:
– Noise
– Silence
– Low bit-rate encoding
– Network errors (both in mobile and packet-switched)
– Delays, Echo, Jitter, etc
– Handsets/terminals
Speech quality however corresponds to the clarity or clearness of speech delivered from a speaker to a listener, but when talking about speech quality in packet-switched networks we’ll find lots of factors that affect the quality:
– Vocoder selection
– Front-end and signal level clippings
– Signal loss and packet loss
– Signal gain/ attenuation
– Echo cancellation in double talk
– Signal noise from equipment and disturbances from analog networks
And what is quality of speech in the system for a voice service provider? Well, that’s kind of a key issue, because…
- Unhappy customers stop using the service
- Continuously unhappy customers move to competitors and spread negative word of mouth
- If the goal is to obtain new and retain existing customers a service provider requires:
– Effective means to test and monitor quality of voice services
– Ability to receive voice quality metrics for end-users
So, hopefully all mentioned above clearly shows that transparency and visibility required for effective service quality management is an absolute mus for a voice service provider, which has only one point when thinking of what is voice quality – it is happy or unhappy customers, competitive or failed business, growth or a downswing…
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