Virsae finds 99 per cent of calls are passable, but users often misdiagnose problems

Historical records often point to a network component like a router, rather than the actual root cause

Virsae Service Management has analysed the service quality of almost 260 million calls, to help IT managers find the root cause of any glitches in their voice communications.

The results of Virsae's data dive, which evaluated factors including latency, jitter and delay, show that the vast majority (99 per cent) of calls had a quality of ‘good' or ‘satisfactory'. Only 0.2 per cent were rated ‘poor' - although that was still more than 400,000 calls.

Most problems in the poorly-rated calls were related to the endpoint configuration; issues included ethernet speed, misconfiguration of the QOS model and a mismatch between the network topology and requisite call server configuration. The most significant problem was found in software releases, especially those related to the endpoint digital signal processor (DSP).

COO and Virsae co-founder Ross Williams praised companies like Microsoft for making it easy to set up a unified communications system; but added that users often underestimate the planning required to keep voice functioning at peak performance, when it has to compete with other data and users on the same network:

"UC systems that worked like a dream during a trial often wobble when call volumes spike and network users flit to YouTube on their lunch breaks."

He added: "In most cases, poor quality calls are the first indication that something isn't right. Often the situation prompts managers to reach for historical records, which invariably point to a component on the network - a router perhaps. Only often it's not the router.

"A deeper dive often highlights a configuration issue - for example an endpoint sitting in the wrong VLAN, or QOS tagging that is not correctly prioritising packets of data. So, while network monitoring flags a malfunctioning device, the root cause remains a mystery."