How To Run a VoIP Quality Test and Improve Your MOS
VoIP quality tests measure the performance of your network connection. This test simulates a number of calls on the network and uses key metrics to determine how the calls sound under different circumstances.
It can help you understand whether your connections are strong enough before implementing a VoIP system and alert you to potential post-deployment issues.
Mean Opinion Score (MOS) is the industry standard metric for VoIP call quality—it’s a simple 1-5 rating system, where 1 is the worst and 5 is the best.
Any score above 4 is sufficient and any score below 3.5 should be considered unacceptable. Below this range, users are more likely to experience microphone echo, dropouts, choppy or robotic sounds, and disconnections.
This guide covers everything you need to know to perform VoIP testing and adjust settings to optimize your MOS.
What VoIP Quality Tests Measure
Before we dive into how to perform VoIP quality testing, it’s important to understand what metrics you’ll be returning and what they mean.
Every VoIP test is different, but the metrics for most tests are as follows:
- Upload and download speed — Measures the speed at which data packets travel through the network. Generally speaking, the higher the speed, the better the quality.
- bandwidth —The maximum amount of data that can be transmitted over the network. It has a direct impact on how many simultaneous calls you can make before the quality drops drastically.
- Jitter — Difference between sent and received packets. If these changes are large, users may miss entire words or sentences during a call.
- Latency (or ping) — Measure the delay from one caller to another. High latency is often caused by network congestion and causes echoes.
- Packet loss — refers to packets that never reach their final destination. If it exceeds 1%, calls may suffer from audio intermittent and other distortions.
Many also let you simulate different calls VoIP codec. This parameter defines the degree of compression that occurs during the call. More compression makes data packets smaller, speeding up transfers and reducing network congestion.
However, too much compression will reduce the audio quality until it is no longer identifiable. The key is to find a good balance that works for your team.
Finally, some of the better VoIP quality tests calculate MOS by taking all of these elements and metrics into account.
It’s also worth noting that some tools allow you to run tests with different numbers of simultaneous calls, and you can even change the original location of the calls.
When you adjust different parameters and variables, you may get different MOS. For example, you might get a perfect score next to the router, but a lower score if you’re on the other side of the building.
See: learning How to optimize your VoIP network.
How to run a VoIP quality test
There are dozens of tools that allow you to test VoIP quality.
To keep it simple, I’ll show you how to do it for free in just a few minutes, and what you can use if you’re a developer or need more granular insights.
Free online VoIP quality test
Many business phone providers have their own online VoIP quality tests that you can use for free. They’re very simple and quick, which makes them great if you’re not quite sure what’s going on and just need a simple way to tell if your network is stable enough.
Most measure latency, jitter, upload speed, and download speed. Some (but not all) also measure packet loss and calculate MOS.
RingCentral’s Service Quality Test One of the best free options I’ve seen.
The best part of this test is that it gives you MOS. It also measures packet loss, latency and jitter in audit summaries.
Another highlight of RingCentral’s testing was the ability to adjust codecs. You can also test up to 50 concurrent calls and run the test for up to five minutes – the longer the test, the greater the chance of finding problems.
Once the test is complete, it does a good job of explaining what all the numbers mean and whether your connection passed or not.
It’s also very simple to run. All you have to do is select your preferred number of concurrent calls, adjust the duration, and adjust the codecs as needed.
While RingCentral is one of the most detailed free options, there are other options you can use to verify your results if you wish.
There are other VoIP quality tests on the market that you can use, and it might be a good idea to try several to see if you get consistent results across the board. Here are some others worth checking out:
- Nextiva test — Simple option for testing up to 200 simultaneous calls.
- uncle’s test — An easy way to check latency, jitter, upload and download speeds.
- 8×8 test — Similar to Ooma, but allows you to change hosts.
Overall, RingCentral’s tests are the most detailed, but these other free VoIP quality tests can give you more data points to ensure accuracy.
See: To learn more about our favorite VoIP providers: RingCentral Reviews | next comment | Omar review | 8×8 review.
Network monitoring software (paid and free trial)
Network monitoring software IT network administrators often use it to ensure their networks run smoothly. It is also useful for identifying problems with various components (routers, servers, firewalls, switches, etc.).
You can also use them to test VoIP network quality, and they provide much more detailed information than any free tool.
solar wind VoIP Network Quality Manager is one of the best. Instead of a one-time test every now and then, it runs continuously in the background.
Although SolarWinds is not free, there is a 30-day free trial. You can test your network for an entire month to see how its performance changes over time. From there, you can decide whether you want to continue using it.
In addition to basic VoIP quality statistics, it also provides WAN performance metrics. It also provides contextual information related to performance issues.
For example, you can view specific IP addresses of devices that are causing jitter, latency, or packet loss. This will help you determine whether call quality issues are related to network hardware or other issues.
There’s much more to this software than that, but it’s a great option if you need instant data or more data points to understand and improve your MOS.
2024-12-13 20:07:06