VoIP Call Monitoring

VoIP has its separate advantages and disadvantages. The greatest advantage of VoIP is price and the most disadvantage is call quality. For businesses who deploy VoIP phone networks -- particularly those who operate busy call centers (customer service, tech support, telemarketing, etc) -- call quality issues are both unavoidable and unacceptable. To analyze and fix call quality issues, most of these businesses employ a technique called VoIP call monitoring.

VoIP call monitoring, also known as quality monitoring (QM) uses hardware and software solutions to test, analyze and rate the overall quality of calls completed over a VoIP phone network. Call monitoring is a key constituent of a business's overall quality of service (QoS) plan.

Call monitoring hardware and software uses various mathematical algorithms to measure the quality of a VoIP call and produce a score. The most common score is named the mean opinion score (MOS). The MOS is measured on a scale of one to five, although 4.4 is technically the highest score likely on a VoIP network. An MOS of 3.5 or above is measured a "good call".

There are two different kinds of call monitoring: active and passive. Active (or subjective) call monitoring occurs before a company deploys its VoIP network. Active monitoring is often done by equipment manufacturers and network specialists who use a company's VoIP network completely for testing purposes. Active testing can't occur once a VoIP network is organized and employees are already using the system.

Passive call monitoring analyzes VoIP calls in real-time while they're being made by definite users. Passive call monitoring can notice network traffic problems, buffer overloads and other glitches that network administrators can fix in network down time.