Tests: Microsoft Office Communicator Beats VoIP Handsets In Terms Of Call Quality
Source: asteriskblog.com
This might come in as a surprise to most of us, particularly Asterisk enthusiasts. A recent study conducted by a third party has determined that Microsoft’s Office Communicator worked better than Cisco-manufactured IP deskphones, in terms of call quality, as VoIP news reports.
The study was commissioned by Microsoft itself, but was conducted by a reputable testing firm, Psytechnics, which would add to the credibility of the study. The testing involved the use of Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 on the server side, and Office Communicator 2007 soft phone on the client side. The test came in two portions, the subjective and objective.
The subjective tests involved human testing, where 32 individuals made calls under different controlled conditions. These include noisy and quite environments, and varying network types, which represent real-world situations. The testers noted lags, and audio quality, and gave numeric rankings from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest).
The objective part, meanwhile, involved algorithms that replicated the results of the human testing with 95 percent accuracy. The advantage is that Psytechnics was able to test in larger volumes, because machines don’t tire out as easily as real people. These are typical analyses uder the ITU G.1050 standards for evaluating the performance of multimedia transmissions via IP networks.
And the results?
The outcome surprised the testers, according to Benjamin Ellis, VP of marketing and product management at Psytechnics. “We were kind of blown away by the results,” he says. “To see that desktop software-based telephony outperformed an industry standard IP phone is actually quite a takeaway.”
This comes as a big issue, especially for businesses deciding whether to go for hardware-based VoIP solutions, or software phones instead. Usually cost and call quality are the foremost concerns when making this decision. Even more striking is the fact that Microsoft’s solution beat Cisco’s industry standard 7961 model IP phone (working with a standalone CallManager installation) at its own game.
Microsoft’s Business Division president Jeff Raikes announced that the results of the study will be published by April this year.
