The official ITSPA Awards test results make for very interesting reading. All entrants for the Best ITSP, consumer and SMB categories had their services independently tested by Epitiro.
There were 16 entrants for these two categories. On average Epitiro made 400 calls per company and then took over 50,000 technical measurements. Calls were all made over the same broadband connection.
All bar one company tested reached the ITU-T P.862 PESQ MOS Quality rating in excess of 4.0 thus meeting the ITU-T P.800 subjective rating of ‘Excellent’. The one that didn’t met the subjective rating of “Good”.
Consumer VoIP MOS downstream average = 4.3
Consumer VoIP MOS upstream average = 4.25
Business ITSP (SMEs) MOS downstream average = 4.25
Business ITSP (SMEs) MOS upstream average = 4.25
There is no real reason why there should be a difference between consumer and business downstream MOS.
Packet Loss was very minimal. Only three companies experienced any packet loss (minimal – 1.3% was the highest loss)
Call set up times were in general on a par to the PSTN standard of 2.5 seconds and better than mobiles.. The customer would experience no difference.
These are great results and are a serious independent endorsement of VoIP as a mainstream communications technology that can replace traditional PSTN services.
PS MOS = Mean Opinion Score and represents perceived quality of a telephone call.