Implementing VoIP: a voice transmission performance progress report

Abstract

Aiming to introduce voice over IP networks and services in ways that satisfy the voice quality expectations of our customers, we have been conducting laboratory studies of how VoIP transmission affects voice quality while also carefully monitoring and managing several field implementations of VoIP. This article summarizes much of what we have learned in this work, and we hope it provides a useful progress report on the industry's evolution to VoIP. We review our data on the voice quality effects of packet loss, delay, speech coders, packet loss concealment algorithms, and the compression option of suppressing transmission during silence. Because the familiar problem of echo has emerged repeatedly in the VoIP environment, we review this issue in some detail. Packet loss and delay variation measurements made on private VoIP networks are reviewed, and the data here are encouraging. We finish by making our case that the network planning tool known as the E-model is currently an inexact predictor of VoIP network performance.