As someone who needs to stay on top of the service assurance market, I need to keep up with the latest news.  As I cruise the major news sites, somewhere between the story of a bear vs moose tangle and the latest American Idol update, I came across a commentary about the quality of mobile phones from Sascha Segan at PC Magazine. 

The article focuses on the sound quality of mobile phones as perceived by the user and takes the angle that the phone itself is to blame.  I'll come at the problem from a little different perspective - it takes a lot more than a high quality handset to make a high quality phone call.

Making a phone call is not as easy as it used to be.  The old days of direct connections between two people on a pair of wires and always-available service are being replaced by IP-routed backhaul and service interruptions during power outages (check out the latest Verizon commercials about how reliable the old phone network is). 

To further complicate the matter, we are untethering our devices from the network and relying on over the air radio transmissions to carry time-sensitive voice traffic.  Add to that the ability to
untether the microphone and speaker from the device via bluetooth, bandwidth competition from email and data downloads, and multiple hand-offs between network elements like routers, switches and gateways, and you have a lot of places in the transaction where voice quality can be degraded. 

What is a network operator to do?  Well, they are promoting quality based on the percent of dropped calls, network reliability and the speed of the network.  One network operator is even publicizing the ability to kick the tires for 30 days.  But, at the end of the day, all of the network operators are all looking to provide the highest quality experience to a customer, no matter how that customer is accessing the network. 

A lot of work is going on in the background to migrate infrastructure to higher bandwidth and higher speed connections to the base stations, create and enforce service level agreements (SLAs) between network providers and network peers, and subjectively measure the customer experience across the network. 

Of course, voice is the most time-sensitive traffic carried across the network, and now there are a wide range of services being added to the mix.  Comcast and Sprint recently announced Pivot, a new service that links your Sprint mobile phone to your Comcast digital services, such as high-speed Internet and mobile TV. And more converged services like these will continue to tax the bandwidth that network operators currently offer.  How these high bandwidth services directly affect the quality of voice is yet to be seen, but a significant investment is being made to architect a network that can handle converged services simultaneously.

In the end, the network operators who take quality seriously (as well as customer satisfaction) are starting to roll out converged service assurance solutions for voice that address the user’s quality of experience two different ways - actively sending traffic between network segments to isolate disruptions before they affect the user's perceived voice quality, and passively assessing voice traffic across the network to discover quality trends before the problems become widespread. 

The combination of active and passive testing provides a host of benefits, not the least of which include reduced truck rolls and tighter SLA enforcement.  Right now, not everyone is confident enough to drop their landline completely, but with great service assurance coverage, that day is rapidly approaching.

Charlie Baker
Director, Product Management
Brix Networks