I've been researching the video quality standards and have been learning about a little known agency of the US Department of Commerce - the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences, in Boulder CO.

The ITS has been active in development of video standards including several ANSI standards that also contribute to ITU recommendations. ITS was established in the 1940s as a radio propagation lab as part of the National Bureau of Standards in the US Dept of Commerce. The ITS, as the research and engineering branch of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration also offers interesting resources including this cool chart of the US Spectrum Allocation.

The ITS has conducted a subjective analysis of video quality for public safety applications study and is busy writing Statement of Requirements for video surveillance and mobile radio systems.

They've also written and offer for free download an automated video analysis application that embodies a measurement paradigm called 'reduced-reference' video quality measurement. The ANSI T1.801.03-2003 incorporates the ITS' three patents on the method and algorithm and is the basis for the ITU reference ITU J.144 "Objective perceptual video quality measurement techniques for digital cable television in the presence of a full reference."

The interesting thing about the ITS' Video Quality Measurement technology is that it performed so very well in international subjective testing comparisons - at the 95% correlation level.

Communicado-Inc of Santa Ana CA has developed a really solid product-software-service combination that promises to really shake up the market for quality of service management by making it VAR-friendly, scalable into small organizations of as few as 50 users, and commercially attractive.

Our research on the quality of VoIP service management shows a compelling need for defect-free communications and a solid differential between the Poor Performers and the Top Performer.

The appliance only model falls short on two counts - the box makes it very costly (software licenses and on-board storage for historical analysis), and the engineering expertise of the person manipulating the UI and the data means that the enterprise-user has to be large enough to afford one or more headcount skilled in VoIP network operations. Not something easily found in a 100 person organization. In the sub-500 user environment, IT professionals pretty much have to be generalists, or specialists in only the core business applications/environments, where VoIP quality is not usually considered one of those.

Communicado's solution is called Streamline and it involves deploying one or more small processing platform, called the OpenToolBox in the customer network. This device is a Windows Embedded platform that is designed to reflect meta data about the VoIP sessions in progress to the central service - called Streamline Central. Here's where the presentation of graphics, alarms, alerts and analytics are made available to both the supporting VAR and the enterprise in question. Knowledgebase and context-sensitive links are available to accelerate diagnosis and problem resolution.

The Streamline Central service is uniquely designed to allow collaboration across the various levels of support, so it's not just a multi-tenant type service. This is a critical capability for VARs that are transitioning to Managed Services. They can share dashboards with multiple customers and be the only ones to see all the alarms from all the customers, while each customer can see their own specific dashboard.

Communicado is running a promotion for free network assessments, which involves a lengthy report from a software-only automatic audit of the network's capabilities for handling VoIP traffic. Of course you should assess your network readiness before deploying VoIP. Analysis by others show that you can double the probability of a successful implementation by doing so. But usually, these cost thousands and take months to perform. 

Streamline simplifies the painful process of network assessments and makes it fast, and inexpensive (can't get much cheaper than free).

Communicado is positioning the legacy service-intensive assessment solution of the past (bring in an engineering guru who deploys specialty hardware for a few weeks and then delivers a written report) as obsolete. Communicado is positioning the trusted VAR as a key local resource for managing the ongoing satisfaction with the quality of the service since here is where the 50+ user organization is going to find expertise able to solve typical voice quality problems.

Management-as-a-service is an idea who's time has come.

It should be.

Think about the phone calls that you’ve taken at your desk  in the past few weeks. How often do you experience garbled speech? Background noise? Calls suddenly dropping? Audio delay? Participants can’t hear you or you can’t hear participants?

45% of participants in the Brockmann & Company report When Quality Counts said they experience at least one of these most common defects at least once in the past month; 22% experience it at least once a week; 8% at least once a day.

This is shocking to me. Especially when I see that 85% of respondents consider voice communications to be very important to the success of their business. So, I would expect that given the importance, network and telecom managers will make improving voice quality in telephone communications a high priority.

This is probably going to receive some resistance. The stressful economic conditions we’re facing now will induce executives into suggesting that we need to do some tightening of belts, reducing expectations and otherwise making do with less. This new voice quality solution (maybe from Psytechnics , Communicado or Prognosis)  may just get postponed for these reasons.

Your internal level of voice quality and its causes are certainly customer affecting. Even if your company still has a good ol’ digital PBX, chances are customers are calling in on their IP PBX and there’s a good chance that the long distance carrier is using VoIP and compression in their backbone, which when used in tandem can cause even more serious quality degradations, that your brand could be blamed for.

Some think that the quality of the experience doesn’t matter since users have been conditioned to expect poor quality from mobile services. This is utterly false. 61% of customers’ say that their perceptions of the suppliers’ brands decline when they experience voice quality defects in calls with them. And a third of respondents, especially those with the worse quality experience are willing to pay more to get Quality.

Besides, mobile services offer that great advantage of convenience. Users are rightfully willing to tolerate quality degradation and premium prices if business calls can be made to me even while I’m on the golf course.

Probably the most compelling argument to improve Voice Quality is the business performance argument. A common practice in Brockmann & Company reports is to apply the Brockmann Methodology. to rank order respondents from those with the least frequent quality problems to those with the most. Then we compare the bottom 15.9% against the top 15.9%. This comparison of the ‘Poor Performers’ against the ‘Top Performers’ shows that Top Performers had:

• 19% more revenue per employee
• 4 times more customer satisfaction
• 3 times more employee satisfaction

In a increasingly competitive marketplace, it is clear that Quality more than pays its way. Download our report to capture the recommendations on how to become a Top Performer.

I have been a fan and collaborator of Steve Taylor, owner-operator of Webtorials.com, the white paper repository for the communications industry, for many years. Vendors, standards fora and analysts post their reports and papers there for authenticated user consumption.

A recent post, originally written in the September 2007 issue of BCR, by Zeus Kerravala, called "Management may be the most important VOIP application of all" (subscription required) really set the stage for much of my upcoming research and writings on the Quality of Experience in converged networks.

Key points that Zeus brings up:

• Yankee Group research showed that 80% of enterprises have deployed VoIP, but only 6% have done so throughout their enterprises. It's still a pocket technology - used in WAN replacements or remote extenders, in branch offices or in small business or medium businesses. 
• The converged network must be managed to assure quality VoIP given the dynamics of ever stochastic bandwidth-intensive and insensitive data or video applications. 
• The systems management vendors such as CA, IBM and HP are not addressing these needs. They may have the wrong architectures to manage real-time applications performance in real-time.  
• Emerging vendors such as  Prognosis, Opsware, Clarus, Psytechnics, Voyence, Intelliden, Brix and Communicado fill this gap by measuring Mean Opinion Score (an ITU standard for call quality) and reporting on it. But this is not enough. You have to be able to dig deeper into the infrastructure state to know the answer.