PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE
While intrusive tests are certainly a straightforward way to assess voice quality, it's neither practical nor desirable to conduct such tests on an ongoing and widespread basis. Enter ITU-T Recommendation P.563. This recommendation is the result of collaborative work between Opticom, SwissQual, and Psytechnics, three European voice quality software and hardware vendors that, previous to P.563, had their own proprietary versions of passive voice quality analysis software. Released in May 2004, P.563 does extensive waveform analysis and is therefore computationally intensive. It's typically deployed on carrier-side gateways and probes.
Opticom has live demos where you can test the quality of any phone connection at www.3sqm.com. When I tested my cell phone, Opticom gave it a MOS rating of 2.06--pretty darn bad. My office phone got a rating of 3.74--almost toll quality. As I learned, these algorithms are good, but not perfect. In my one-off test, I'd guess that a caller on the other side would have estimated the quality to be higher than what Opticom's demo site determined. This isn't unusual for P.563 tests.
REALITIES OF VOICE NETWORKS
While MOS and the newer objective measurement techniques are a great starting place, they alone don't define a user's satisfaction with a particular call--at least not in the incarnations we've described so far. First, these tests are listening-only tests, so such factors as network delay aren't measured. We've all been on calls where the voice quality is fine, but the delay on the network makes it awkward to carry on a conversation. We essentially can't tell if the other party is pausing to think or waiting for us to speak, or if it's just the network introducing delay.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
