Residential Voice over IP Service Management

Emerging residential Voice over IP services are delivered over cable or DSL broadband access, providing a range of practical management difficulties. VoIP calls may originate from soft clients or residential gateways, and the resulting packet streams may be sent directly between subscribers' homes without passing through the service provider's IP network; this renders conventional methods of performance monitoring and troubleshooting difficult or impossible.

VQmon provides an ideal solution for residential VoIP service management. VQmon is integrated directly into soft clients and residential gateways, non-intrusively monitoring calls and reporting call quality and diagnostic data through RTCP XR and SIP.

RTCP XR reports are exchanged between VoIP endpoints, for example between residential gateways and soft clients, or between residential and trunking gateways. This helps each endpoint to calculate more accurate call quality metrics, enables each endpoint to report call quality for both directions and potentially enables adaptive configuration of endpoints to circumvent problems.

SIP QoS reports are sent by VoIP endpoints at the end of a call, and are collected, analyzed and aggregated by SQmediator. This allows the service provider to analyze both overall service quality and troubleshoot individual calls and subscriber problems.

The widespread availability of VQmon in both products and software and silicon solutions makes this a viable short term solution for residential VoIP service providers. In addition, the wide range of VQmon based VoIP test equipment available ensures that probes, analyzers and handheld test products are available to support in-depth troubleshooting if needed.