Do you trust a computer to tell you how your CEO's new IP phone sounds?

Network testing and monitoring vendors are betting you will as they peddle new call quality management applications that pinpoint problems on converged networks. Despite increasing reliance on e-mail, voice remains executives' method of choice for closing deals, and businesses embracing VoIP can't afford to make assumptions about call quality.

Vendors such as Apparent Networks, Brix Networks, Empirix, Integrated Research, Qovia and Spirent are rushing to fill the void, often licensing algorithms for active testing and passive monitoring from call quality pioneers Psytechnics and Telchemy. "This is the beginning of a big push, though the standards for VoIP call quality measurement are still evolving," says Eric Siegel, senior analyst at Burton Group.

Frost & Sullivan reckons the emergent VoIP monitoring/management market hit $50.7 million in 2004, and expects it to increase about sixfold by 2008. IP telephony is exploding, and upfront network assessments will only take a VoIP implementation so far. Unlike data, it has to work perfectly out of the gate.

"VoIP can be made to run as well and as reliably and as clearly as the best traditional phone network, but it's not a static environment," says Pierce Reid, vice president of marketing for Qovia, a 3-year-old start-up dedicated to VoIP call quality. "It has entropy. This can be accelerated by the employee who decides to download 'Shrek 2' at lunchtime."

Keeping the canaries singing

Network professionals with converged environments liken IP telephony to the cages of canaries that used to accompany the miners below ground. The birds keeled over when conditions in the mine became unsafe. Voice is revealing network problems that used to go unnoticed on IP networks, and the standard data fix - more bandwidth - doesn't work.

"These real-time applications are showing us we have problems on the network end to end," says Walt Magnussen, director of telecom at Texas A&M University in College Station, which uses Apparent's AppareNet Voice software probe to support VoIP and video links to remote locations. "This new tool shows you where it is and what it is."