VoIP Spear Blog — News & Noise

It’s not news that VoIP is becoming more and more mainstream all the time, but it sometimes amazes me how far it’s come.  I first started up a VoIP company about 9 years ago and VoIP was so far out on the fringes that we would never use that term when speaking to customers.

Today, I came across a blog posting about potential uses for VoIP in a physician’s medical practice.  Seven Great Applications for IP-PBXs in the Medical Practice is a quick read and worth a few minutes of your time.  For me, the most interesting takeaway from the article is that it confirms how far into the mainstream VoIP is when there’s articles discussing its uses for such a narrow vertical.

And as VoIP use increases and becomes more commonplace, there will be an increased need for our VoIP Spear monitoring service.

A while back, I noticed a nice little feature about VoIP Spear at VoIP Resources.  It’s flattering to see a positive review like this.

We’re especially pleased that the author of the article really seems to get VoIP Spear.  She starts off by describing VoIP QoS problems at a high level.  When VoIP Spear is introduced as a tool, the article mentions that one advantage is that it is “no-client side”.  This is a subtle point that is easy to overlook — there’s no software to install.  You can just enter your IP address into the VoIP Spear web site and it will start its monitoring.

The article also mentions that you can view your VoIP QoS results in a chart or table format, and that there are several options with regards to our account packages.  About the only the article gets wrong is when it mentions that VoIP Spear servers run tests to the endpoints every 5 minutes.  In fact, our servers monitor the endpoints every 1 minute.

In any case, thanks for the great article, Lauren.

It’s been two months since we launched VoIP Spear and we’ve learned alot in this time.  New users are signing up every day and it’s exciting to see people all over the world using the service.  The first thing I do each morning (and, indeed, several times throughout the day) is check to see who has signed up and where they are from.

I’m not sure if anyone has noticed, but there have been a few small changes to VoIP Spear in the last two months.  We’ve worked hard to make them as transparent as possible so the changes doesn’t interfere with the operation of the site.

We’re open to suggestions.  We aim to make VoIP Spear the best VoIP QoS monitoring service on the Internet, so we need the help of our users.  If you have a comment or suggestion for us, let us know by responding to this blog post or emailing us at support /AT/ toepoke.com.

VoIP Spear servers work by pinging our users’ endpoints.  Ping is a nearly ubiquitous network tool that is used to test whether or not a computer/device is reachable across the Internet.

One problem with using ping is that ping uses the ICMP protocol while VoIP uses UDP.  It was for this reason that we used UDP for testing when we first started developing VoIP Spear.  We were aiming to support two types of testing — basic testing would use ping/ICMP and advanced testing would use UDP.  We envisioned that basic testing would be perfect for novice users because it’s so easy to set up while advanced testing, on the other hand, would be more accurate and perfect for our advanced users.

After a few months, we realized two things:

1. Advanced testing would require users to run a VoIP Spear software app (which we called a UDP mirror because it just bounced back UDP packets to our servers).  This requirement would mean that our advanced tests could only be run on computers capable of running the software, thus excluding many VoIP phones and other endpoints.  In addition, the requirement to run/install software would have meant much lower adoption rates because it’s a pain to install software (especially software like the UDP mirror which needs to be running all the time on users’ computers).
2. The results from our basic tests (using ICMP/ping) were just as accurate as the UDP tests.

So we decided to change course slightly and only offer ping/ICMP testing.  It has meant that VoIP Spear is easy to use rather than a challenge.  This decision also forced us to implement testing from multiple servers, something which lends an even greater degree of accuracy to our tests.

We’ve been delighted with the decision so far.

Oftentimes, I hear people mention bandwidth when speaking about VoIP QoS (Quality of Service).  There seems to a common misconception that bandwidth is the key factor in determining the quality of voice over a network.  In reality, this is not true.  It’s of course important to have enough bandwidth for your VoIP needs, but there are other important qualities of your Internet connection that affect VoIP QoS — packet loss, latency, and jitter.

The Internet works by breaking up all data into small groups called packets.  Occasionally, some of these packets are lost in the network and don’t reach the far-end.  This is called packet loss and results in degradation to the quality of your phone call.   Ideally, you would want packet loss to be 0% (or at least under 1%), however it’s possible for you to experience acceptable VoIP quality with packet loss as high as 5%.

Latency is the amount of time it takes data packets to travel through travel through the network.  For most calls in North America, latency is very low (less than 100-150ms even on the public Internet).  This is excellent and makes for good quality calls.  On the other hand, calls to overseas numbers may have latency in the 250-350ms range or sometimes higher.  At these levels of latency, the quality of the call is affected.  The callers will start to notice the delay.  Fortunately, most overseas callers have been conditioned to expect this type of delay and are comfortable with it.

Jitter is the variation in the inter-arrival time between packets.  In other words, jitter is the consistency of the network — is it consistently feeding packets to the far-end?  Jitter of less than 20ms is usually expected for good quality connections.  When jitter is high, it means that some packets have higher latency than others.  This may cause the packets to arrive too late and be discarded by the other nd of your phone call.

At VoIP Spear, we monitor packet loss, latency, and jitter in order produce the most accurate QoS score we can.  Try our Personal plan today.  It’s free to use and we know you’ll find it useful.