VoIP Provider Looks for Quality Assurance

This Added Insight feature accompanies " TV Snow and Rain Fade ," an article from xchange's December issue . To read more about how planning for next-gen service assurance takes more than a good forecast, click here .

deltathree Inc., a service provider specializing in integrated VoIP, hosted solutions and infrastructure, had a problem: To expand and retain its customer base, it needed a way to achieve toll-quality IP voice on its network, even in remote regions of the globe.

deltathree’s private-label platform lets other service providers and resellers customize and package a VoIP solution using their own brand name and/or the “iConnectHere” deltathree brand name. It also sells direct to end users. Over time, the company has built a user base totaling hundreds of thousands, with retention as a big goal for the operator.

Continued expansion is also on the agenda. deltathree has made building a presence in the Asian, African and Middle Eastern regions a priority, but found it difficult to provide sufficient VoIP quality, especially in environments with little to no infrastructure. Without premium voice quality, the provider knows that continuing to capture – and retain – market share beyond early adopters would be a difficult proposition.

“If you close one eye, you can call us a VoIP carrier,” says Gary Coben, director of the VoIP Outsourced Platform Group at deltathree. “But we’re not a Vonage or best-efforts company. We’re actually more of a back-office. We provide the billing, the fraud management, CRM, Web site integration and so on, and the last thing we want are challenges in the access.”

To address the issue, deltathree knew it needed to replace its existing softphone solution with better voice processing technology. Its soft client, PC Phone Dialer, was based entirely on SIP and voice processing software, but did not meet the company’s requirements for matching or exceeding PSTN quality, largely because it’s codec support was limited.

And so, deltathree created the Client Quality Program, tasked with finding a suitable replacement that could be successfully deployed. The company’s engineering department was asked to find a voice processing solution that met a number of business-critical requirements, such as being a field-proven solution. It also had to offer simple and rapid software integration into the provider’s existing platform, it needed to be well-tested, and backward compatibility for the existing customer base was required.

After an extensive evaluation period, deltathree selected the Global IP Sound VoiceEngine Advanced PC solution to be the core voice technology in the PC Phone Dialer. The solution uses GIPS NetEQ and GIPS codecs to achieve low latency and high packet loss, while also supporting GIPS and standard narrowband and wideband codecs. It also offers RTP handling or support for customer-specific media transport protocol. For voice quality enhancement, it contains acoustic echo suppression and cancellation, a tuning wizard, automatic echo detection on/off and video synchronization.

“It was really just a necessity to support different codecs and enhance the voice ingress,” says Coben. “This sits at the edge of the network where the media processing takes place, and ensures the service quality is where it should be, no matter the underlying infrastructure.”

After integrating VoiceEngine with the PC Phone Dialer, the combined product was deployed in regions where the softphone previously had experienced the most problems with quality of service. In the weeks following the trial deployment, deltathree received positive feedback from their resellers that there had been an overall improvement of call quality. Perhaps more importantly, during the first weeks, deltathree saw an increase in both call minutes and new subscribers of the PC Phone Dialer service.

Global IP Sound www.globalipsound.com
deltathree Inc. www.deltathree.com

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