If you use the internet for real-time services like voice and video calls, you know how frustrating it is when your network quality is poor. Laggy conversations, jittery audio, and pixelated video can turn your meeting into a struggle. This is where VoIP Spear comes in—we give you the tools to keep an eye on your network performance and make sure your internet experience is smooth.
We recently released a great new feature that makes it even easier for you to troubleshoot network issues: zoomable charts! This handy update makes it so easy for you to zoom in on specific time periods so you can dig deeper into the problems you're experiencing.
We're excited to announce the launch of Sentry, our new software product for monitoring network quality. Available for both Windows and Mac, it's a quick download and easy install. Once set up, Sentry runs quietly from the system tray, continuously monitoring network quality.
Home users and small businesses can benefit from using Sentry because it continuously monitors the network. This means it detects potential issues before they escalate into bigger problems, thus minimizing downtime.
Service providers who install the software give themselves valuable insights into the network quality issues their clients are experiencing. They can then use the information provided by VoIP Spear to help on tech support calls. This will reduce the time spent on each call which means less frustration for customers and less time and money spent on support issues.
We've worked hard to make Sentry simple to set up. Once you have finished installing the software, it begins its work immediately, running in the background in the system tray and not requiring any input or maintenance from you.
Read MoreThe quick answer is that internet speed tests are concerned with bandwidth (or quantity) whereas VoIP Spear tests the quality of your internet connection. This is important because network quality is critical for real-time services (like voice, video calls, video games) over the internet.
A more detailed answer is below.
Internet speed tests are primarily concerned with bandwidth. In other words, they test the amount (or quantity) of data you can send across your internet connection.
Bandwidth is plentiful these days. My local ISP’s entry-level internet service comes with 75Mbps. This is pretty typical in North America though many service providers offer even more bandwidth. A VoIP call takes about 0.1Mbps and a Teams/Zoom call about 1.5Mbps. Thus, the entry-level service supports about 750 simultaneous VoIP calls and 50 simultaneous Teams calls/streams!
Read MoreIn the fast-paced industry of esports and gaming, one thing that remains constant is the need for a stable and reliable internet connection. A lag-free experience is paramount, making the monitoring of internet quality an integral but often overlooked aspect of the industry. In this post we will explore the reasons why monitoring internet quality is important for a high-end gaming experience.
In the world of online gaming, latency (the time it takes for data to travel from your device to the game server and back) can be the difference between victory and defeat. Esports and gaming require split-second responses and high latency can lead to delays in action. Continually monitoring your internet quality can help you identify latency issues. If an unwanted pattern emerges you may need to adjust router settings, troubleshoot network issues, or increase bandwidth.
A stable internet connection is as important as low latency when it comes to high-end performance. Fluctuations in packet loss and jitter can lead to an unstable internet connection and even a complete outage. Regularly monitoring your internet quality can help identify inconsistences in your connection and empower you to implement protocols that ensure your gaming experience remains uninterrupted.
An effective tool for monitoring internet quality is VoIP Spear. VoIP Spear is designed to run continually, testing network conditions every 60 seconds, over an extended period of time so you get a rich set of data back about your network. The data is then displayed for you in easy-to-read charts so you can see issues and detect patterns quickly.
VoIP Spear is also extremely quick and easy to implement. The only thing you need is your IP address so you can start monitoring your network performance in minutes.
Read MoreThe VoIP services market is extremely competitive. You’re focused on providing a best-in-class experience for your customers; however, the reality is that not all potential customers are an ideal fit for your service. There are varying degrees of quality to internet connections which means some customers won’t have a good experience regardless of how well-crafted your service is.
This is where the concept of using Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring tools to assess and pre-qualify customers comes into play. QoS monitoring tools measure the following:
Some customers have poor internet connections. This is out of your control meaning there’s nothing you can directly do to resolve the problem. By pre-qualifying these customers, you can gain the following benefits:
Read MoreInformation sent across the internet is split into small units called packets. This applies to all types of data -- email, web pages, voice calls, streaming video, etc.
Packet loss occurs when one or more packets of data are lost or fail to reach their destination. This can occur due to a variety of reasons such as network congestion, faulty hardware, or physical interference.
For a home network, packet loss can have a significant impact on the overall user experience. For instance, if packets are lost while streaming video, the video quality may become poor and may even freeze. Similarly, packet loss during online gaming can result in players experiencing lag and an overall degradation of the gaming experience. In some cases, packet loss may even cause the complete failure of a connection, resulting in a complete outage.
Read MoreIn this post, we explore the common reasons people have issues with their VoIP service. We also provide some troubleshooting tips and educational information about the problems and their solutions.
There are three main factors that can contribute to issues with VoIP:
Networking issues in your home or office;
Phone and voice quality; and
Internet connectivity.
I just finished reading a blog post titled "VoIP Spear: Monitoring and Cutting To the Heart of Your VoIP Problems" by Innovation Sask. It provides a great overview of VoIP Spear.
It's so nice to see a write up about VoIP Spear that makes it easy to understand what we do. VoIP Spear, at its core, is very technical and this means it's important to clearly explain what it is and how it works. Our last blog post was titled "What is VoIP Spear?" for this very reason.
Customers shouldn't need to be hardcore geeks in order to understand how VoIP Spear can benefit them. This is ultimately why we started VoIP Spear in the first place -- to provide an easier and more accessible way to do VoIP quality monitoring.
Innovation Sask's post also mentions our new Sentries. These are small hardware devices, about the size of a computer mouse, that monitor the quality of your internet connection 24x7x365. They essentially do the same thing as VoIP Spear's all-software solution, except that they're hardware devices you install onto your network. The Sentries provide an advantage in that they are able to monitor from inside your network so they have more visibility to certain classes of problems. The Sentries are small and easy to install, requiring only an internet connection and power.
I'd like to thanks the folks at Innovation Sask for highlighting VoIP Spear. It's a real honour.
Read MoreVoIP Spear is a web service that assists when you’re having voice quality issues on your phone calls. We monitor your internet connection and track the reasons your problems occurred.
VoIP Spear has been operating for more than 12 years and has helped tens of thousands of users with their voice quality issues.
The internet is a packet-based network system, meaning that it splits data up into thousands of small chunks called packets. Most of the time, the internet performs well and the packets reach their destination properly, however sometimes that isn’t the case.
Services like email and web traffic have mechanisms to deal with imperfections with the internet connection. Unfortunately, voice calls are extremely sensitive to these issues and this is what causes your frustration.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreThanksgiving might be over but there's still Christmas and New Year's Eve coming. Valentine's Day is also not too far off. There will be a lot of voice traffic in the next few months. You have to be prepared for this. You need to stay accessible with good quality VoIP service; and there are things you can do on your end to ensure this.
The first thing to do is to use a VoIP monitoring service, such as VoIP Spear. It is actually best to not wait for periods when you expect voice call traffic. Setting up an account with VoIP Spear ensures that you're on top of your VoIP's performance. You will know right away if there are problems with your service. During high voice traffic season, such as Christmas and New Year's, this becomes crucial.
Sometimes, the problem lies in your setup, not in your VoIP service provider. Many hardware technicians say that the proximity of your VoIP equipment with each other can result in some audio problems, such as feedback. So, to easily curb this, set up your equipment as far apart as possible.
Read MoreOftentimes, 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.
Read MoreVoIP 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:
I just finished reading an interesting rebuttal to the comments by the ConnectWise CEO that "Telephony is dead."
George Bellini, the author of the post, counters:
...telephony is THRIVING and no time is better than the present to offer your customers the answer that you have chosen to provide and add value by being a single source technology provider.
I have to agree with Bellini. Telephone is alive and well. It's merely just a subset of telephony, the on-premise PBX market, that is suffering. Bellini wrote a post about this a few months back.
The strengthening of the hosted PBX market is good news for VoIP Spear. As PBX's move off the network the phones are on, it becomes increasingly important for firms to monitor the connection between PBX and phones.
Read MoreCloud-hosted service is not just a buzzword. The industry has taken hold of enough of its market such that it can make all the noise it wants. It is something that is here to stay.
The mindset that moves it forward is the increasing openness to outsourcing. The premium given to exclusivity and internality is long gone. After all, why insist on being exclusive and internal when what you have isn't the most optimal system for your needs?
Read MoreVoIP Spear is now monitoring your endpoints every minute of the day, rather than once every five minutes like it used to.
We made this change last week. It's probably the most impactful update since VoIP Spear went global in 2014.
Over the coming weeks, we intend to bring more new features to VoIP Spear. Here is a list below.
After months of work, we're proud to announce that VoIP Spear's new design is ready.
In the coming weeks and months, we're going to be releasing a whole raft of new features. You're going to see a whole new look for VoIP Spear, additional reports, additional ways to test your voice quality, and more.
Take a look at some of what we have planned.
Our most important new feature is going to involve higher frequency testing. This means we will be able to report on more of the issues you are experiencing.
We have a whole new look for VoIP Spear that you're going to love.
Read MoreThe cloud-hosted VoIP market is nothing less than amazing. It is one of the fastest growing technology markets in North America and the rest of the world, particularly with small-to-medium-size businesses. More and more service providers are getting into the picture, wanting a piece of the lucrative and burgeoning market.
You may come to wonder: Is there really a big market for VoIP service providers? Where is the industry headed? What are the opportunities for new service providers?
The industry impresses when you look at numbers alone. A report by Frost & Sullivan shows the astonishing growth of the hosted VoIP industry in the last few years. A 5% growth each year is a minimum.
The year 2013 ended with users at a high 5 million. This represents a 30.5 percent increase from 2012's number of users. That's an increase of more than a million cloud VoIP users.
Read MoreToday, we're excited to announce two new VoIP Spear servers. One is located in São Paolo, Brazil, and the other in Vancouver, Canada.
We now have 16 VoIP Spear public testing servers as well as dozens of private servers VoIP Spear customers have set up. These public testing servers are located in major cities in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. A complete list is below.
| Region | Country | City |
|---|---|---|
| North America | USA | San Francisco |
| North America | USA | New York City |
| North America | USA | Chicago |
