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If you still think voice-over-IP's quality will never equal that of good ol' POTS, you haven't heard voice calls coming through the latest VOIP gateways. For the last couple of months that's all I and the MierComms' lab-test staff have been doing. Our consensus? VOIP can, if properly set up and tuned, unquestionably deliver quality equal to the Plain Old Telephone System. The operative words, of course, are "if properly set up and tuned...:' And it's not easy to find folks who can do that. VOIP is still new, and it straddles both telecom and datacom skill sets; people with expertise in both are few.
Moreover, the job of building a well-performing and well-tuned VOIP network is made even more difficult because the products differ considerably when it comes to how easy it is to tune key operational parameters. Table I (p. 6) summarizes some of these key parameters and compares the"tunability" among five VOIP gateway vendors we recently tested as part of the overall 1999 BCR Best-in-Test for VOIP gateways for the enterprise.
What follows below is a discussion of the test results in the category "Management and Administration." The complete results of the tests are reported in BCR, January 1999, pp. 28 35). The vendors who did best in the management and administration category offered users broad access to the parameters controlling voice quality, along with the right tools-intuitive GUI, good on-screen help, effective documentation. and so on-to correctly set these parameters. Specifically:
Hypercom's product came in first place with a score of 85 (on a I-100 scale). Hypercom offers users access to all the parameters in the table, as well as a tidy and fairly intuitive Windows-GUI management application, IENview, for user access to the"IP.tel" gateway platform. Hypercom lets users access and vary parameters down to individual channels, which means that rather than having to apply one setting for the whole system or for all channels within a TI, the user can tweak each one individually.
Nuera, whose F200 gateway received the overall BCR Best-in-Test award for the second year in a row, was ranked second in the management category with a score of 82. Nuera's NueraView Windows-GUI application gives users ready access to most key parameters affecting voice quality.
Clarent also...