On 1/4/09, Nitzan Kon <nk3...@yahoo.com> wrote: > --- On Sun, 1/4/09, Kristian Kielhofner <kristian.kielhof...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Getting back on topic, will there be any sort of ranking > > for quality? > > > I would love to maintain a separate table/search based on > quality. The real question though is how do you quantify > "quality". Maybe through user reviews, although those tend to > be too subjective to really rely on long term. i.e. a user > might think their VoIP provider has the best quality or worst > quality - but in actuality it's the only provider they've tried. > > Maybe give points for quality of support, time in business, > reported call quality, etc. and come up with some type of > formula to sum it all up to a ranking.. > > Will have to think about this one. :) > > -- Nitzan > http://www.comparevoipproviderrates.com >
Nitzan, There are many factors but I would be willing to help you with this. For US based providers, for example, my utility recqual could be used to provide a pretty clear overall picture of actual call quality. I know my shameless plug here might seem suspect but I swear - I'm no where near that calculating! My concern would be various tricks providers could use to fool any IP only automated tools. There are classic examples of providers providing gateways to ping, etc that *clearly* have ICMP optimized and may even be in different address space than the actual equipment used to terminate the call (read: RTP endpoint addresses, etc). Any provider that uses IAX, for example, is most likely proxying the media and converting it to SIP/RTP at some other point in the network. IP based tools have no visibility into what happens to that media once it isn't IAX anymore. An audio analysis tool like recqual cannot easily be fooled by such practices because it tests actual audio quality through to the PSTN. Any underlying problems (network, host, implementation) will be reflected in the actual audio quality. I would be willing to provide some expertise and maybe even hosting for this effort. Listing in the directory could require a minimum number of recqual test calls to determine a baseline of quality. As long as the test runs were done with some consistency the results shouldn't be skewed that much. Certainly some providers would score better than others based purely on geography (proximity to the machine running recqual). Of course there are ways around this too but it would require a much larger, organized effort. :) -- Kristian Kielhofner http://blog.krisk.org http://www.submityoursip.com http://www.astlinux.org http://www.star2star.com _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
