Have you ever had a jumbled-up phone conversation, where you and your friend appear to be having two separate, disjointed conversations, with sentences crossing over and a generally incoherent discussion? Usually this is a result of poor audio quality, and it can be extremely frustrating.
Test and monitor your call quality from your customer’s perspective with Cyara’s voice quality testing solution.
This is a widespread problem, especially with online calls. Conversation elements often mix oddly, coming through in parts, like a bad game of Scrabble. When it comes to interacting with a business, this can easily frustrate a customer and impact the quality of the conversation.
This issue is a common cause of poor Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) conversations. And unfortunately, this can adversely affect business growth in terms of higher call costs, operational inefficiencies, reduced customer satisfaction, and increased staff churn.
What is VoIP?
VoIP enables individuals to make calls over the internet. It’s a great solution for many businesses, offering unprecedented flexibility and efficiency in telephone systems. Compared to making calls over traditional phone lines, VoIP enables significant cost savings by transferring the voice over the internet as input.
VoIP provides feature-filled telephone service, without the need for expensive equipment. However, the same factors that make VoIP so effective can also lead to poor service quality. As a result of VoIP’s reliance on an internet connection to make calls, your service may become prone to delays and hiccups if a connection error occurs.
Because VoIP depends on internet connections, it can often be difficult to eliminate latency. This can create significant issues, such as jitter.
The “Jitterbug”
In telecommunications, “jitter” generally refers to the variation in latency or the time delay in the arrival of the packets which carry voice or video data over a communications channel. Under ideal circumstances, packets are delivered in increments to maintain a smooth dialogue. However, since your voice data is divided into individual packets, the information isn’t always received in the same order it was spoken. In other cases, network interference or congestion can cause some packets to reach the recipient faster than others.
In simple terms, jitter occurs when information arrives at the recipient’s end in a different order from how it was sent.
There are three types of jitter:
- Random Jitter: Also called “Gaussian jitter,” random jitter is unpredictable electronic timing noise. Clock timing problems or random electronic timing noise can cause this type of jitter.
- Deterministic Jitter: Often predictable or determined, deterministic jitter is reproducible and may occur periodically. This type of jitter can either be correlated to the data stream (data-dependent jitter) or uncorrelated to the data stream (bounded uncorrelated jitter).
- Total Jitter: As the combination of random jitter and deterministic jitter, total jitter can be calculated using a bit error ratio (BER). You can use this mathematical formula to calculate total jitter: Total jitter = Deterministic jitter + 2*BER*Random jitter
What Causes Jitter?
Here are several common factors that can cause jitter:
- Wireless Networks: While wireless networks offer mobility and convenience, they often result in degraded network connections. Wi-Fi, in particular, isn’t inherently safe or reliable, and may lack the security required for high-quality calls.
- Bad Hardware: Internet networks comprise various hardware components, such as modems, routers, and switches. Obsolete modems, damaged Ethernet cables, or misconfigured routers can all easily contribute to call quality issues.
- Network Congestion: By far the most common cause of jitter, and network congestion occurs when a network becomes overcrowded with multiple devices. Insufficient bandwidth will lead to dropped or out-of-order packets, significantly slowing down connections.
Other notable causes of jitter include network capacity, bad routing through a network, and low hardware capacity on a source.
Jitter is a prevalent and frustrating issue which affects the quality of your VoIP calls. In fact, it can prompt many users to abandon calls altogether. According to Cisco, excessive jitter, surpassing 40 milliseconds (ms) will profoundly undermine your call quality. Ideally, it’s recommended to maintain jitter below 30ms where possible.
Minimizing Jitter
But it’s not all doom and gloom when it comes to jitter.
A jitter buffer is a useful caching system for receiving data packets and can dramatically minimize the impact on your call quality. During a VoIP call, software creates packets of data that contain elements of the call. Then, these are then sent across the network to the receiving end. Depending on its size, the jitter buffer can temporarily store these packers and ensure that they arrive at their destination in the correct order.
However, while extremely useful, jitter buffers aren’t a “magic solution.” Having too large of a buffer can introduce some delay and increase latency, so you need to take care when choosing your buffer’s size.
Cyara can provide insight into these jitter buffers with our proactive monitoring, and number testing, and voice quality testing solution.
The Importance of Network Monitoring
Network monitoring is a necessary component to ensure that your internal network’s hardware and data services are operating efficiently and effectively. However, whereas traditional tools tend to focus solely on your private network, Cyara’s testing and monitoring functionality extends far beyond this limitation by verifying the entire call journey.
End-to-end Latency
As shown above, network monitoring does measure a variety of audio quality factors, including jitter. However, Cyara’s number testing offers a significantly broader understanding of performance and provides you with an end-to-end perspective.
At Cyara, we possess unparalleled expertise in measuring and monitoring all aspects of the customer experience. With our comprehensive tools and voice quality testing solution, you can ensure that your network consistently supports high-quality customer conversations and fosters overall business growth.