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Ditech Networks (News - Alert), provider of voice quality solutions, is set to open its proprietary Experience Intelligence (EXi) solution to all carriers and vendors in the global VoIP and mobile services industries. In addition to deploying EXi on its own voice quality platforms, Ditech will also make multi-platform support available to the communications industry as part of its EXi Everywhere Partner Program.

 

Since its introduction in February 2006, EXi has been used by 16 carriers in 12 countries to measure real-time voice quality on more than 630 million live calls. EXi happens to be the only solution that quantifies the impact of voice quality impairments caused by the places where people make calls, codec impairments, and by the extensive range of mobile devices like phones and headsets.

 

EXi has been utilized in the industry as a complement to existing test and measurement solutions. By incorporating EXi into existing drive tests and network monitoring solutions, the communications industry can add important new information from the subscriber's actual call experience to data from the network.

 

"By unhooking EXi from its voice quality platform products, Ditech opens to the industry an important solution that's needed to fully access voice quality," said Stephane Teral, an industry analyst with Infonetics. "Before Ditech, there was no objective way to quantify voice quality impairments caused outside of the network. By pinpointing the source of substandard voice quality, the industry can make critical adjustments to networks and devices to deliver a consistent, high-quality call experience."

 

EXi operates in the voice stream on live calls to unobtrusively collect real-time information about impairments. Ditech uses Telchemy's (News - Alert) implementation of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) G.107 E-Model to produce an R-Factor, which is a standardized rating of voice quality. In the mobile industry, the R-Factor is often converted into a MOS (Mean Opinion Score) value. Although many organizations use Telchemy's E-Model to measure network parameters like dropped packets and jitter, EXi is the industry's only solution to combine network parameters with real-time information about live impairments in the voice stream.

 

An R-Factor of 50 (or MOS 2.5) is considered by the ITU and the communications industry to be the minimum level of acceptable voice quality.

 

The EXi Everywhere Partner Program allows VoIP and mobile carriers to establish a new Key Performance Indicator (KPI), which can track the impact of voice quality on the subscriber's call experience in real time, in addition to establishing trends over time. EXi can also be used with PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation Of Speech Quality) and other methodologies to correlate the impact of the radio frequency network and the caller's environment on voice quality.

 

"The EXi Everywhere Partner Program demonstrates Ditech's commitment to accurately assess voice quality, and to pinpoint impairments that cause subscriber dissatisfaction," said Todd Simpson (News - Alert), President and CEO of Ditech Networks. "Consumer surveys have uniformly shown that users blame service providers for voice quality problems, regardless of where they originate. Now the industry has the tools needed to identify and quantify voice quality impairments that exist outside of the network, and to take action to fix them."