We had a great year here at VoIP Spear. Our service has been instrumental in the phenomenal growth of the industry. And the new year is looking like another great one for VoIP and VoIP monitoring!
As a leading global provider of VoIP performance testing services, we play a crucial role in ensuring consistent VoIP service quality. Individuals and businesses – those that provide telecommunications services and those who rely on them – are always better off when they have our monitoring services set up. Performance inconsistencies and possible problem scenarios can be logged and addressed swiftly.
For businesses and individuals, this was the year when VoIP became a truly reliable alternative to wireline telephony. In the past, it has always been the more affordable choice while still dodging questions about reliability. This changed as the technology improved immensely. Alongside VoIP Spear's monitoring service, there is now the guarantee of communications services that can provide for the demanding requirements of businesses, big and small.
Here are some articles where business VoIP and VoIP Spear take center stage:
Read MoreI was surfing recently when I stumbled across two nifty little posts about VoIP Spear.
"Testing Your Network Connection for Packet Loss and Latency" was written in April by Tely Labs. They have included a large screenshot showing one of our VoIP Spear charts so the post looks very nice.
I like how the post is a "How To" guide for using VoIP Spear. For example, it explains that an endpoint is "defined as your public IP" and that latency is "a synonym for delay". As someone who is immersed all day long in the world of VoIP troubleshooting, I sometimes forget what a normal perspective is.
The post's last section is also pretty useful. It talks about the type of information you should have handy if you want to call up your ISP to report a VoIP call quality issue. It has me thinking about how we can build some of this information into VoIP Spear.
Read MoreWe start the year right at VoIP Spear! Beginning January, you can now select your testing servers from multiple locations in North America, Europe, Asia and South America for each of your endpoints. This means that you can get the most accurate results by choosing locations closer to your endpoints.
2014 draws near as VoIP continues to make headway into telecommunications, practically taking over chunks of what used to be wireline companies' market. VoIP technologies and services have greatly improved through the years. Costs have remained consistent, if not lower. And network support is better than ever. It is a great time to make that big VoIP switch. But before you take the next step, switching to VoIP may not be for everyone -- at least not yet.
Ask yourself three questions:
Read MoreAt VoIP Spear, we believe that VoIP is the next step in the development of telecommunications. Anything that is not moving toward VoIP - transitioning into using it as their main means of communication, or at least trying out the technology through free accounts - is missing out on immense benefits: savings, telecommunications convergence, and accessibility, among others. But there are many who do miss out, partly because of the notion that transitioning to VoIP is complicated.
This isn't really the case. Switching to VoIP can be quick and simple, even for businesses. Of course, there's a lot more investment necessary for those wanting corporate VoIP accounts. Still, the long term savings will make up for it. Here's a quick guide to help you transition to VoIP.
One of the first things that you need to have ready when you want to transition to VoIP is a good internet service. Getting good VoIP service is partly dependent on how good your network connections is. If your network service provides enough speed and bandwidth for additional data packets - this time, voice packets - then you're halfway to being VoIP-ready. If you are setting up VoIP for your home, you should at least be on DSL service. If this is for a corporate VoIP account, being on a T1 line is necessary.
Then, of course, you need to get a VoIP service account. Your VoIP service provider can be from practically anywhere. But, it's always better to get with a provider that has a good reputation among your peers and colleagues, and is readily accessible to you in case you need technical or billing support. They should ensure an uptime of at least 99.99%. And, it's also good to know if they implement service quality monitoring, perhaps through VoIP Spear's call quality monitoring service. Ask them about how they monitor their service.
Read MoreVoIP sometimes gets a bad rep because of data packet delays, which lessen audio and video quality. The effect of packet delays to VoIP quality varies – and there will always be packet delays.
Delays are natural occurrences in telecommunications, even traditional communications. After all, voice and data travel through a series of systems: from satellites to landlines, or from servers to landlines to your digital phone. The difference between one service and another is the amount of delay. And delay has a direct effect on the quality of communications.
Good network service is able to minimize the effects of delay on your VoIP quality. Effects are negligible, imperceptible even. You experience continuous good quality talk and video reception. This is VoIP at its best.
Sometimes however, you may experience packet delays, which translates to increased latency in your network and VoIP systems. Latency is defined as the time it takes for packets to travel from one point to another. Increased latency can cause dips in VoIP quality, which is perceptible to the users as low audio and video quality, echo, feedback and pauses.
Latency issues can be addressed by either the user or the network manager, depending on the severity and cause of packet delays.
Read MoreSmall business owners need to make lithe business choices in this recovering economy, and one of the best choices they can make is changing over to VoIP phone service. VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is the modern phone technology that allows users to make phone calls over the Internet.
VoIP is an extremely cheap and efficient phone solution for small businesses. All VoIP providers offer many customizable options, like scalable extensions and free calling features, so businesses can choose the best VoIP solution for their business. However, it can be tough to know where to start when looking into this new technology, so here are the top 10 reasons that a small business should choose VoIP service for their business:
Business VoIP providers offer phone service for half the cost that traditional providers offer. Most VoIP providers offer business plans at an average of $20/month per extension. There are often three main options when it comes to extensions: metered extensions, virtual extensions, and unlimited extensions.
A metered extensions plan is a business VoIP plan that charges by the minute. This is a good option for employees that make just a few calls a day.
Read MoreVoIP Spear has been operating since 2008 and the site was starting to lose it's sheen, so we decided to do a refresh. At first, we were planning minor changes only, but one thing led to another and, before we knew it, two months of intense programming had passed.
The biggest change is the main chart page. We replaced the old Flash charts with Google charts. More significantly, we're now showing just one time period on the page. The default view is a six hour time period, and it's easy to change that. Also significant, we've broken the three main data points (MOS, packet loss, latency) out into their own charts.
Another welcome change is the My Account page. It now looks more like a dashboard with recent MOS for each endpoint shown in a gauge.
We've made countless other minor changes and fixes.
What do you think? Do you like the new chart presentation? Are the MOS gauges on the My Account page helpful to you?
Read MoreOn January 20, 2013, between 11:00pm and 1:00am EST, we will be performing maintenance on the VoIP Spear web server. As a result, the web site may be unavailable for a period of up to one hour.
Testing results will be unaffected by this maintenance.
Read MoreVoIP Spear has always included the ability to calculate MOS using the big three codecs of VoIP: G.711, G.723, and G.729. We've recently added support for GSM, G.722, Speex, and iLBC.
VoIP Spear uses the E-Model of computation for estimating MOS from network statistics like packet loss, latency, and jitter. In order to complete the E-model calculations, we need to know some characteristics about each codec. For example, how much does the codec itself degrade voice quality. Another characteristic would be: how does the codec perform under packet loss conditions.
For G.711, G.723, and G.729, it's very easy to find this information because these codecs have been studied a great deal. This isn't the case for Speex and iLBC. It's hard to find information because they are newer codecs and weren't developed by the ITU. As a result, there haven't been many studies that look at these codecs in the context of the E-Model. Nevertheless, we managed to track down a few papers here and there. We're confident our MOS calculations for Speex and iLBC are accurate.
Calculating MOS from G.722 is a different situation altogether. G.722 is a family of codecs (G.722.1, G.722.2) that is available at several different bit rates. In fact, quality is greatly affected by the bit rate that is used. We didn't want to include all of these bit rates because we want VoIP Spear to be easy to use. Also, some of the other codecs (G.723, iLBC) also provide different options for bit rates so we wanted to be consistent.
In the end, the compromise we arrived at was to assume that G.722 is used at 64kbps. Without any impairments caused by the network, this will provide quality better than even G.711.
Read MoreIt'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.
Read MoreMy family and I are on holiday in Croatia right now. We're staying in a bungalow on the Adriatic Sea in a little town called Brodarica and it's been very hot (35°C or 95°F). As I type this, I'm looking onto a peaceful morning on the Mediterranean. There's boats sailing by, children playing in the sea, and I can hear all sorts of sounds from birds and insects in the trees.
This morning, I logged into my VoIP Spear account to check how things have been going. There was a bunch of new signups, and a couple of new paid subscriptions since yesterday. I'm happy. In fact, I'm more than happy. I'm ecstatic. I'm able to keep tabs on my world (email, VoIP Spear) from the comfort of this other world.
Life is good.
Read MoreJust a quick posting to tell you that we've replaced our "North America: North" server. It's been giving us problems of late so we decided the best solution was to retire it. The new server is on the East Coast and we're pretty happy about that -- we now have servers on the West Coast, East Coast, and in the middle of North America.
It was a performance issue that finally caused us to make this decision. It had degrading to the point where the results from our VoIP testing was compromised. We found ourselves spending time diagnosing the issues and making little changes here and there to work around the problems. In the end, we're happy to rid ourselves of that headache.
We have automatically updated all VoIP tests to use the East server if they were using the North server previously.
Read MoreWe're now offering pricing discounts for customers who pre-pay for multiple months. We've been planing this for a while but it wasn't until recently that we actually had the time to implement it.
Take a look at the discounts below. We wanted to get pretty aggressive with the discount on 1 year plans and I think we've succeeded.
The savings can be quite substantial. For example, if you are on the Bronze plan and you pre-pay for 1 year, your savings will be $60.00!
Read MoreThe VoIP Spear API is ready at last. It's pretty easy to use, though you can judge for yourself after reading the instructions. The API is RESTful meaning that it's lightweight and easy to learn. I'd imagine it's easier to learn a RESTful API rather than one based on SOAP or XML-RPC.
We have a few customers who have been asking for the API already, so it will be interesting to see what they can come up for VoIP Spear mashups and add-ons.
The VoIP Spear API is available to those customers who are signed up on the Bronze plan ($25 per month) or greater. Check our prices to see if you can use the API with your VoIP Spear account.
One last thing: feel free to suggest any changes or additions to the API. We've left some of VoIP Spear's features out of the API because we thought they were unnecessary (in the API). If you think differently, let us know.
Read MoreIt's been two months since we launched VoIP Spear and we've learned a lot 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.
Read MoreVoIP Spear has only been live for a few weeks, yet we're seeing good numbers of users signing up for service. It's nice to see the fruits of our labours.
One nice thing about going live is that we're finally seeing how real people use VoIP Spear. A few problems have come to light, the most common of which is that our VoIP testing isn't working for some users -- the MOS for their endpoints is always 1.0 (the lowest possible score). We figured out pretty quickly that this is happening because their router or firewall is blocking ping/ICMP traffic, resulting in 100% packet loss. VoIP Spear servers use ping/ICMP for running the tests to all of the endpoints.
The solution to this problem is to ask the affected users to unblock ping/ICMP traffic. This certainly works, however we decided it was time to implement a support/help section in the web site. It took a few days to create this and enter the content, however we're finished now and pleased with the results. We also think our users will appreciate having a resource to help solve their problems rather than having to email us.
Read MoreGreat news, everybody! VoIP Spear is finally live. The Internet's finest VoIP QoS testing and tracking service is ready and raring to go.
We've worked hard to make VoIP Spear a compelling service right from the get go. Our Personal plan suits the needs of most casual users. It's free to use and lets you monitor one endpoint. For small businesses or users who need a little bit more, we can offer our Basic and Standard plans. Beyond that, we have our Bronze, Silver, and Gold plans which are perfect for carriers offering VoIP to their customers because these plans support many more endpoints. If you have more than 100 endpoints to track, please contact us and we'll work with you to develop a pricing model that suits your needs.
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