Burlington, Mass.-based wireless telecommunications company iBasis (News - Alert) is a global voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) services provider who leverages the attractive economics of Internet-based communications to route calls around the world at greatly reduced cost. In fact, the company provides wholesale, international Internet telephony services to carriers and other service providers worldwide. These service providers are reaping the benefits of VoIP without having to invest a ton of time, or additional money in equipment, systems, and staff.

According to iBasis, more than 170 wireless telecom carriers worldwide, including all of the best-in-class service providers in the U.S. are on its customer list. “The key to financial success, however, is striking the right balance between Internet economics and carrier-class quality,” said iBasis in a case study from EXFO (News - Alert).

 “Our goal is to consistently achieve the best, most cost-effective connectivity possible among our points of presence (PoPs) around the globe,” explained Paul Skelly, manager of network performance at iBasis.

He added, “For our customers, call quality is non-negotiable. If we can’t achieve the right quality over the Internet, we must use alternative routes that will. However, these off-net routes may cost us more to use than an Internet route. In fact, because we guarantee service quality for our customers, we could lose money on a call that we cannot route over the Internet. So having accurate, realtime measurements of Internet call quality is of strategic importance.”

To deliver VoIP service quality, the wireless telecommunications company iBasis has the ideal technology partner. After evaluating a number of commercial systems from various vendors, iBasis found the right technology partner just 10 minutes up the road in Chelmsford, Mass., at EXFO, a provider of real-time Internet service assurance and performance management solutions.

“The EXFO Service Assurance solution is truly carrier-class, robust, easily managed and very scalable. As a global provider to major carriers, with more than 780 PoPs around the world in more than 90 countries, this was critical to us,” Skelly added. “The Brix System also has robust data collection, data warehousing and provisioning capabilities. And it has carrier-grade interfaces, which simplify network integration.”

iBasis installed Brix 1000 Verifiers in its eight Internet central offices (ICOs) located around the world. This distributed system is managed with the BrixWorx central-site software and its network operations center (NOC (News - Alert)) in Burlington. The Brix System provides iBasis with end-to-end monitoring and measurement of call quality between PoPs along multiple paths, aggregating a variety of fundamental performance metrics—including packet loss, delay, and delay variation or jitter—in near real-time.

The Brix System also measures availability and performance of H.323 and other call set-up services, which often involve multiple cooperating servers and applications. “Right from the start, the Brix System became our eyeballs on the network,” stated Skelly.

Since it was initially deployed, the Brix System has been fully integrated with PathEngine, a patent-pending component of iBasis’ own proprietary Assured Quality Routing (AQR) system, enabling dynamic, performance-based routing.

Skelly concluded, “The Brix System actively verifies performance between different sites on our network, communicating with PathEngine every five minutes.”