Telchemy Announces VQmon
VQmon provides the emerging standard for voice quality measurement and monitoring that models the effects of time-varying network impairments
ATLANTA (April 23, 2001) - Telchemy, Inc. announced today its flagship offering, VQmonTM, the emerging standard in voice quality monitoring for Voice over IP services. VQmon is the first product that measures time-varying network impairments and models their effects on subjective quality, such as human short term auditory memory to provide a voice quality metric.
VQmon is a lightweight, computationally efficient, real-time, embedded voice quality monitor that can measure and monitor all calls made over Voice over IP (VoIP) networks. It integrates easily into VoIP gateways, communications servers, IP phones, test equipment, analysers and other VoIP-related equipment. VQmon extends the ITU E model standard with sophisticated technology that models the impact of packet-loss-bursts, time-varying-impairments, and the recency effect.
Network impairments, such as packet loss, delay and jitter, are not constant in time, resulting in variable voice quality being experienced by the end-user during a call. VQmon is able to model both the way that the user experiences quality in real time and their opinion of call quality at the end of a call.
"Service providers are concerned that the quality of Voice over IP calls is less predictable than that delivered by their existing network," said Dr. Alan Clark, president and founder of Telchemy. "The ability to monitor the end user perceived quality of calls will allow service providers to manage their service in real time, avoid over-provisioning, improve subscriber retention and increase their confidence in Voice over IP technology. This will accelerate the rate of deployment and adoption of the new infrastructure."
Commenting on this subject in the February 2001 issue of Computer Telephony, Chris Bajorek wrote, "Until unlimited bandwidth is available and free to all, time-varying network impairments will exist and have to be dealt with. I think it's a safe bet that we will start seeing Telchemy's technology embedded into VoIP products soon. It's even possible to integrate this real-time monitoring into external boxes as long as information about the current call's CODEC and other parameters are known. If VoIP manufacturers are smart, they will put a lot of effort into this, and soon. Our industry could use it."
"Brooktrout Technology believes that QoS management is one of the most important enabling technologies for emerging Voice over IP services," said Andy O'Brien, Vice President and General Manager, New Public Networks Group. "Incorporating Telchemy's VQmon technology into our products will allow our customers to monitor the end-user perceived voice quality of every call made in their network. This will allow them to provide consistent service quality and differentiated services."
VQmon's code is compact, highly portable and computationally efficient. VQmon is OS and processor independent. As a cost-effective, lightweight, yet powerful embedded application, VQmon has negligible impact on its host processor or system performance.
VQmon is orderable immediately, with shipments beginning on April 30, 2001. Pricing is composed of source license, nominal run-time royalties, and maintenance fees. Interested parties should contact Telchemy for details.