The Telecommunications Industry is about the delivery of various types of Voice and Data mediums to the end-user, amongst other things. In today’s society these mediums are the backbone that keeps everything from business to recreation in our lives perpetually moving. For business, working in the Airline Industry, the delivery of Voices Services to the End-user is key for both revenue generation and the operational safety of an airline.

Gone are the simple two copper wires which connected (99.999% of the time) the telephone handset through the telcos network to grandmas handset at the other end of the country. The use of voice services (dial tone), for inbound and outbound calling in today’s telecoms infrastructure relies more and more on the use of TCP/IP Protocols. These protocols use the data network to route voice calls all over the globe (as well as to grandmas telephone handset), but has its inherent side affects. One of these is the Quality of voice.

Data networks are busy mediums routing email, delivering webpages to browsers, gaming, social media and much more. In amongst all of those Services is voice (and video) struggling to fight its way through the data network in the form of packets, little pieces of information trying to get to its destination. As the packets race through the network, they will go through a multitude of different routing devices which are busy trying to process all of those packets. If configured correctly, routing devices know that voice (and video) protocols have a higher priority to other data packets but Inevitability (like trying to book a ticket on a plane to a destination where you have various stops), the routing device will be too busy (Or full) and will refuse (drop), the packet. These are known as Jitter and Latency and is where voice quality issues start.

The most common form of voice quality issues that raise their ugly head are echo and clipping which derive from Jitter and Latency in the Data Network. To the caller and the receiving party, hearing ones voice repeated in the headset or sounding like the other person is stuttering, does not bode well for a ‘Good’ call.

For an Airline, delivering a guests call to a Contact Centre agent or the flight line calling the Airline Network Operation Centre (NOC), a clear and audible communication is a must. When calling the Contact Centre to book a flight, you want to know that the agent can hear you and understand your request. If not, the caller is going to get frustrated, hang up and more than likely call a competitor airline which is where revenue is lost. Similarly and more importantly, the safety of an airline is paramount. When an Flight engineer calls the NOC say that an Aircraft is not fit for flight, the communication should be clear so that the NOC does not release that aircraft for scheduled Service.

Quality of Service (QoS) in a data network is standard tool of the routing device that allows you to ‘tune’ the network to certain level for a particular device. This does not allow you to holistically configure (and monitor) the network end-to-end, which is often missed by network administrators.

In this blog I have (briefly) introduced you today’s Voice Network and how it routes across the Data Network and one of the key issues, Voice Quality. I have also mentioned the tool you can use to help ‘tune’ the network. In my next blog I will introduce you to the ‘Mean opinion Score’ (MoS) and how it can be used to ‘finely tune’ the voice (and video) network.