Making IP Video quality work more effectively for your business
The IP video users' experience has changed a great deal in the past few years. The endpoints are higher quality, the networks are lower cost and higher speed and the users’ expectations are higher than ever before. These factors drive a willingness to accept improvements and provide IP video communications professionals the resources necessary to create and maintain a high quality IP video experience.
Independent research by Brockmann & Company shows that business benefits accrue to organisations enabling high quality IP video services and implementations. In the report, 'I Can See Clearly Now', Top Performers were defined as organisations with the fewest IP video defects and possess internal processes to measure video quality most frequently. Top Performers have 2 times more customer satisfaction, 2.5 times more employee satisfaction, 25% higher market share and 4 times higher greenness than their Poor Performer peers in organisations with the highest frequency of problems and lowest frequency of measurement. The report also showed that 7 times more Top Performers are very satisfied with their video quality than Poor Performers and that Poor Performers are willing to pay 5 times more for defect-free IP video communications.
As the demand for ever-more sophisticated telepresence suites, high definition video communications rooms and ever-more distributed personal IP video phones and PC-based HD web cameras increases, the need for IP video quality measurement and support will grow. However, IP video is not just RTP traffic on steroids, and most VoIP management tools simply don't work for IP video traffic or don’t work well-enough for quality IP video traffic. Vendors of quality IP video communications equipment have used IP video quality as a differentiator and implemented forward error correction technologies or dynamically adaptive packet loss features that work to automatically improve the users’ experience.
Without understanding these often-proprietary technologies, many QoS tools generate too many unnecessary alarms on IP video quality, which over-stimulates the support staff to react to IP video quality problems that really don’t affect the user experience or the user's perception of their experience.
The Psytechnics architecture is the platform for maintaining IP video quality of experience
Psytechnics overcomes this weakness by characterising the leading vendors' IP video communications endpoint error-correcting technologies and incorporating that insight into the Experience Manager’s predictive algorithm. This way the boundaries between the endpoint responsibility and the network elements are more precisely defined and automatically adjusted to assure that support staff are engaged in problems that really affect users’ IP video quality of experience, instead of problems that are supposed to affect the users' IP video quality.Through a distributed information gathering system architecture, Psytechnics customers can see real time IP video quality metrics in aggregate or on a session-by-session basis to quickly respond to problems and make sure that any service providers or other support departments are also appropriately engaged in corrective action. In this way, the highest IP video quality service generates high user satisfaction. The enterprise IT director can do their job with the confidence that critical business communications happen with the kind of reliability and quality that users prefer to take for granted.
Psytechnics takes an end-to-end view of the IP video quality challenge. We analyse the operating characteristics of endpoints and monitor the attributes and configuration settings that most contribute to IP video quality. We capture real time communications streams and analyse their control parameters to form a unique and complete picture of the users experience. The Psytechnics Experience Manager then compiles these data inputs to form the most complete predictive view of the user experience and uses that information to recommend alerts, alarms and ultimately corrective action such that:
| • | Support professionals can manage IP video quality through real time predictive analysis of session-by-session experience |
| • | IT staff can measure experience impacts of specific MCU ports, session border controllers, codecs and endpoints |
| • | Detailed call visibility reports significantly reduce operations, support costs and resource requirements for troubleshooting real time IP video services |
| • | The highly accurate problem diagnosis enables accelerated corrective actions |
| • | An objective view of IP video quality before-after state for project signoff when implementing new sites, new infrastructures or application upgrades |
| • | The rare ability to pinpoint sources of IP video quality faults, including external service providers is available to Psytechnics customers |
IP video quality doesn't have to cost more
With Psytechnics Experience Manager, the many factors contributing to IP video quality, adjusted for the endpoint vendors' capabilities to compensate for network or codec effects are carefully and constantly monitored. Alarms are generated less frequently than typical QoS tools that lack equivalent endpoint awareness.At the same time, using the predictive experience capabilities of Psytechnics Experience Manager, the IP video support staff can respond to IP video quality issues that really affect the user experience, and can take or recommend far more prescriptive and accurate corrective actions which accelerates time-to-repair. Reduced frequency of problems, reduced time-to-repair and a comprehensive end-to-end view of IP video quality are the keys to reducing support costs and improving the consistency of the IP video user experience.
