VoIP Quality is highly affected by network performance, which means that network issues like packet loss, latency, and jitter can negatively affect VoIP Quality and lead to problems like choppy voice quality, laziness, and significant voice delay.
To make sure that your VoIP Quality is always at its optimal level, and to avoid any embarrassing robot voice during your next client call, in this article, we’re running you through how to monitor VoIP Quality with MOS Score.
Network Monitoring for VoIP Quality
Continuously monitoring VoIP calls in search of potential problems can be hard to do on your own. Luckily, monitoring VoIP Quality using a tool like Obkio Network Performance Monitoring gives you full visibility into your LAN, WAN, Internet, and service provider network, to measure metrics that affect VoIP Quality the most.
When monitoring VoIP Quality, it’s important to combine results from different network metrics to get the most detail.
Obkio’s Network Device Monitoring feature allows you to monitor the performance of networking devices such as firewalls, routers, switches, and wifi access points is crucial for IT teams. The Device Monitoring feature inside the Obkio Software is a simple solution to provide you with detailed information about the health of devices that may affect VoIP Quality.
Monitoring VoIP with MOS (Mean Opinion Score)
The Mean Opinion Score, more commonly referred to as MOS Score, is the most commonly-used metric to measure the overall voice call quality.
Voice Quality MOS Score is most often based on a scale from 1 (bad) to 5 (excellent) of the perceived quality of a voice call. Although originally Mean Opinion Scores were derived from surveys of expert observers, today a MOS Score is often produced by an Objective Measurement Method approximating a human ranking.
MOS Score vs VoIP Call Quality
Different monitoring tools may measure VoIP Quality using different metrics. Obkio’s Network Performance Monitoring software measures VoIP Quality based on MOS Score.
The MOS score has been adapted to Voice over IP (VoIP) in the ITU-T PESQ P.862. This standard defines how to calculate MOS Score based on multiple factors such as the specific codec used for the VoIP call. Each VoIP codec (ex: G.711, G.722, G.723.1, G.729) behaves differently. Some codecs such as G.711 are uncompressed for higher quality but use more bandwidth than compressed codecs such as the G.729.
Obkio measures MOS Score for the G.711 codec, which is the most commonly used codec for VoIP calls.
Since many users may not be familiar with the MOS Score for VoIP Quality, Obkio shows VoIP Quality results on their VoIP Quality graph which categorizes, for every minute, the MOS Call Quality as
- Best
- High
- Medium
- Lower
- Poor
In Conclusion
Monitoring VoIP Quality using MOS is an easier and more effective way of measuring the metrics that affect VoIP Quality the most. Because VoIP Quality is so reliant on network performance, it’s important to think about monitoring network performance as a whole to be able to get a complete overview of VoIP performance.
Additionally, this method also allows you to monitor the Quality of Experience (QoE) for users using VoIP applications over their network. Quality of Experience (QoE) is a metric used to measure performance from the end-user perspective to better understand if performance met a user’s expectations.
QoE and VoIP Quality are two metrics that work together. You can actually use VoIP Quality as a way to measure QoE, because after all, poor VoIP Quality can definitely lead to poor quality of experience.
So next time you start experiencing poor VoIP Quality, think about MOS Score and consider turning to a complete end-to-end network performance monitoring software.