Voice Quality

The four major issues that can affect voice quality in a VoIP network are jitter, delay, packet loss, and echo. Jitter and delay causes a conversation to sound wavy and distorted. Packet loss causes a conversation to be choppy and entire words can be lost. Echo causes words to be repeated during the conversation.

Delay is the time required for packet delivery from point-to-point in a network. Jitter is the variation in delay over time from point-to-point. These problems can be caused by too many hops between endpoints; insufficient bandwidth to support the traffic and large data bursts.

Equivoice minimizes jitter and delay by having our VoIP servers and gateways no more than three hops from IP telephones on it’s metropolitan network. The average one-way delay between IP telephones and servers is less than 10ms. Equivoice also controls the network between the IP telephones and the servers and Gateways. This enables Equivoice to implement a QOS policy throughout its metropolitan network. The QOS policy gives voice packets priority over data packets and virtually eliminates potential jitter problems. Finally, Equivoice constantly monitors the network to determine if there are any intrinsic network problems that need to be addressed.

Packet loss is losing packets along the data path. Points in the network that have insufficient bandwidth or router resources to process the traffic load generally cause this. The QOS policy in the Equivoice network solves this problem. IP packets are placed in different ques based upon their service types. Voice packets go into the first que and are transmitted to the network before the data traffic. This enables voice traffic to have first priority on the network.

Echo in a conversation is caused by the reflection of sound, from the far end device. The refection is caused by too much sound energy at the receiving end. The Equivoice network has a complete echo cancellation system that constantly measures sound levels. The system minimizes echo problems by automatically correcting the sound levels.