I'm extremely excited about my current role and company which largely involves moving a lot of people into the VOIP world and allowing them to work from home.

However our project has been encountered some "less than steller" voice quality issues.

I am looking for some general guidance on this and wondering if anyone has overcome these problem in the past. The majority of the issues seem to be due to high pings (160ms-200ms is norm) and rebooting all of the networking equipment (both residential and our own often seem to solve the problem).

Symptoms are dropped calls and distored voices, generally the problem is normally with the customer hearing our agents, our agents can hear the customer fine.

Using Avaya IP-Agent, once again, any input appreciated.

Hi Justin,

Are you using any Quality of Service (QoS) protocols to control bandwidth/routing behaviour for voice traffic?

What network providers/topology is used between Avaya CLAN/MedPro resources and the Agent's PC? Is this agents on Broadband connections?

These problems are generally overcome by provisioning end-to-end service on tightly controlled QoS-enabled networks. The fact that you are using ping to test round-trip times suggested that you are using a Best Effort method for routing of RTP. This is the QoS way of saying "best endeavours" which in many commercial uses is not good enough.

Another alternative with the Avaya IP agent is to switch to "Telecommuter mode" and use the agent's standard home phone number to login (this removes VoIP issues completely - but has call-cost issues of course!)

Does this help?

Best rgds,

Seb

Also worth looking at what Codecs you are using, brief explanation below.

Encoding Compression	Bit Rate Kbps	Voice Quality	BW	Mean Opinion Score	Music on Hold
G.722	224	A	D	4.1	A
G.711	64	A	C	4.1	B
G.726	32	B	C	3.85	B
G.728	16	C	B	3.61	C
G.729	8	A	A	3.92	C
G.729a	8	B	A	3.7	D
G.723.1	5.3	C	A	3.65	D

View the A B C…rating like school grades with A= Excellent D= low Pass

Mead Opinion Score rating: 5 Excellent Speech Quality, 4 Good, 3 Fair, 2 Poor, 1 Unsatisfactory Speech Quality


[Table fixed....I think. DB]

Just relaized the formating got lost on my last message. If anyone wants the table in excel PM me.

Are you using any Quality of Service (QoS) protocols to control bandwidth/routing behaviour for voice traffic?


We are trying! :)


What network providers/topology is used between Avaya CLAN/MedPro resources and the Agent's PC? Is this agents on Broadband connections?


Our agents are out using a residential highspeed connection.


These problems are generally overcome by provisioning end-to-end service on tightly controlled QoS-enabled networks. The fact that you are using ping to test round-trip times suggested that you are using a Best Effort method for routing of RTP. This is the QoS way of saying "best endeavours" which in many commercial uses is not good enough.


Personally, I agree but am working in an environment that was already decided before I was involved. There are many things I am concerned with that aren't good enough for commercial use.


Another alternative with the Avaya IP agent is to switch to "Telecommuter mode" and use the agent's standard home phone number to login (this removes VoIP issues completely - but has call-cost issues of course!)


I was toying with this idea as well and reading up on it a bit. I really don't see how this is possible to implement though unless we give them a whole new phoneline which would probably bump the cost of this project into the unreasonable. Now..pardon my ignorance but what sort of costs would we be looking at? Just the cost of the line? There wouldn't be actual charges for the calls made since they are still logging into a local pbx?


Does this help?


Sure does.

Encoding Bit Rate Voice Mean Opinion Music on Hold
Compression Kbps Quality Score

G.722 224 A D 4.1 A
G.711 64 A C 4.1 B
G.726 32 B C 3.85 B
G.728 16 C B 3.61 C
G.729 8 A A 3.92 C
G.729a 8 B A 3.7 D
G.723.1 5.3 C A 3.65 D

View the A B C…rating like school grades with A= Excellent D= low Pass

Mead Opinion Score rating: 5 Excellent Speech Quality, 4 Good, 3 Fair, 2 Poor, 1 Unsatisfactory Speech Quality



So besides my IP agent software telling me it may use G.711 G.729 or G.723 how do I actually tell which codec it is using? This switch side?

Justin,

Not my specialism but I believe Telecommuter can be set up to either:

1) Ring another phone number whenever a call arrioves on the agent station (more of a virtual station really)

- this has problems for customer experience if not answered - probably handled via RONA but still I think the customer hears ringing (someone may know for sure)

2) Nail up a call to agent when they register to the station (log-in)

- this keeps a call to the agent home phone/mobile or whatever all day but can be used with force-feeding calls because agent-end is controlled. works kind of like a hard-dialler.

Sorry for the lack of certainty but I work more with Genesys than the Avaya stuff!

Seb

I suggest you use the g729 codec. Due to high latency of your connection the best compression to use is that codec.

Hi Justin,

our centre tested the Avaya IP Agent about a year ago and found many similiar issues. to further compound the problem, our client markets a cable-telephone system that uses VOIP technology and they ramped up sales at around the same time. Between the 2, we couldn't really determine where the problem lay. However, many of our callers sounded like they were bound, gagged, and at the bottom of a well. And occasionally being beaten with sticks.

Another issue we encountered, which was directly related to Avaya IP agent, is a dramatic increase in dropped calls. We seemed to lose about 20% of our callers when we answered. We also had horrendous issues when transferring out: the 3-way conference link dropped everyone all the time and the transfer link seemed to drop the caller.

As for answers, I don't really have any. As an agent, I am not privy to the higher level discussions. however, I will say this: VOIP is very new technology and the internet is composed of old telecommunications networks. I suspect that the real issue is shaky networking.

Thanks for your input Jeff,

I worked for many years at Convergys and found it quite enjoyable.

I'll agree that VoIP is still a relatively new technology and there are a lot of hurdles that still need to be addressed.