Study: VoIP Quality Continues to Improve

According to Minacom's Standards-Based, North American and Global VoIP Testing Study, VoIP phone service is improving, and in many cases, sounds better and connects faster than public-switched phone network (PSTN). Results show that VoIP service quality increased steadily over the last year, with an average Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of 4.2, compared to 3.9 for the PSTN. MOS is a scale commonly used to describe speech quality, ranging from 1 (worst) to 5 (best).

Based on a MOS threshold of 3.6, only 1 out of 50 calls in North America were considered to be unacceptable–1 in 10 worldwide–while greater than 85 percent of VoIP calls exceeded average PSTN quality over the same period. Detailed results show that VoIP service bettered PSTN quality worldwide, and improved in all regions over the course of the survey. In addition to superior sound quality, calls over VoIP connected quicker overall–8.2 seconds on average, compared to 8.9 seconds for those placed over the PSTN. Regionally, the PSTN was faster to connect for calls placed to North America (4.3 seconds vs. 5.7 for VoIP), while international calls connected faster with VoIP (8.7 vs. 10.4 seconds for PSTN).

Minacom's tests were conducted over PSTN, managed broadband and cable VoIP lines, the same services offered to residential and enterprise customers by phone, cable and hosted VoIP providers. Each month, Minacom's PowerProbe® 6000 service level test probe places hundreds of calls from Minacom's QoS labs in Montreal, Canada, to public destinations worldwide over PSTN, broadband VoIP, cable VoIP, DSL, FTTP and wireless networks, publishing the results in the Minacom QoS Benchmark Reports, a free email newsletter now in its fourth year of circulation.

To find out more about the study, you can read Minacom's press release.