Providers of broadband-based VoIP services deliver their offerings over diverse transport technologies, such as hybrid fiber-coax (HFC) cable networks, high-speed IP networks, and the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), and their delivery architectures are just as varied. A provider may own the last-mile access network, but hand off calls to long-distance and off-net partners. Or a provider may deliver their VoIP services to customers over broadband networks they do not own. What they have in common, however, is that neither owns the whole service, and incomplete ownership means incomplete visibility into service quality.

To subscribers who experience service problems, it doesn't matter what their VoIP provider owns and controls. When they call the customer support line, they expect their problems to be fixed.

In addition to this lack of full visibility, VoIP inherently presents several other concerns to providers of residential VoIP services:

• Users Have High Expectations
  Like it or not, users hold VoIP to the same very high quality standard as the familiar PSTN. The PSTN has delivered decades of "five-nines" (99.999 percent) reliability and crisp voice quality and users expect and demand the same from VoIP.



• VoIP Is A Performance-Sensitive Service
  VoIP is a highly performance-sensitive, real-time service that is especially prone to impacts from network impairments, such as network delay and signal loss.



• VoIP Is A Complex and Multi-vendor Application
  Yesterday's single-vendor, integrated Class 4 and Class 5 Switches are replaced in today's converged networks with upwards of a half-dozen components — gateways, routers, softswitches, session border controllers, feature servers, and proxies — from different suppliers, a complex environment made even more difficult by the fact that no one vendor can provide full service visibility.



• Traditional Monitoring Tools Are Inadequate
  Traditional telephony monitoring tools and general-purpose IP network management tools do not offer the service-wide visibility, actionable performance information, or VoIP-specific metrics needed by providers.

Individually, each of the above is a challenge, but combined they pose an even more formidable problem.

THE REQUIREMENTS
To overcome these challenges, and provide consistently high-quality VoIP services to their subscribers, residential VoIP providers need to:

• Identify, isolate, and resolve problems
  The Brix System enables service providers to quickly find and fix problems using a variety of tools and capabilities, including: call quality, root-cause analysis; network path analysis, and on-demand and threshold-based conditional troubleshooting.



• Separate customer premise or partner issues from those in the provider's infrastructure
  When a problem is reported, service providers use the Brix System to answer the essential question, "Is this problem ours or not?" With Brix solutions, network operators can easily trace performance problems to their source, pinpointing whether the problem lies in the customer's home, the access network, the softswitch infrastructure, the IP core, or the long-distance network.



• Evaluate partner quality
  In addition to providing real-time visibility into the performance of their own infrastructures, Brix VoIP management solutions allow service providers to continuously validate the performance that their IP and PSTN off-net and long-distance partners are delivering to them.



• Prequalify prospective subscribers' broadband quality to ensure satisfied customers
  The Brix System makes it possible for providers to identify subscribers with substandard broadband quality in order to tailor service delivery to their environment (e.g., selecting bandwidth-conserving codecs), or prevent them from signing up until the quality problems in their home or access network are corrected.



• Continuously monitor service quality
  By continuously measuring the performance of both live and actively generated calls and other traffic, the Brix System enables providers to know, at all times, whether they are meeting target service quality goals, and dispatches early warning alerts for substandard quality and failures for outages.



• Help customer care representatives quickly and effectively resolve subscriber-reported problems
  The Brix System extends visibility and troubleshooting capabilities to end-user locations. Providers have the option of testing directly to the subscriber's home with agent-less configurations, like the Brix Golden Phone, or deploying powerful, software-based Brix agents at the end-user location under the control of a Customer Support Representative.

BRIX BENEFITS
Providers that deploy Brix VoIP management solutions realize the following benefits:

• Faster problem identification, isolation, and resolution within their network or a partner's or subscriber's network
• Reduction in costly outages and service degradations
• Faster time to market with the right services for their network
• Shorter mean time to repair (MTTR)
• Reduction in expensive customer care costs
• Higher levels of end-user satisfaction

TYPICAL DEPLOYMENTS
Facilities-based providers, who own and control much of their VoIP service delivery infrastructure, and outsourced VoIP providers, who own and control little of that infrastructure, both require VoIP service visibility out to the customer premise. Due to the differences in their service architectures, each deploys the Brix System differently.

• Last-Mile VoIP Providers
  Providers install the BrixWorx central-site software at a regional data center (RDC) and typically deploy Brix 1000 or Brix 2500 Verifiers, depending on expected subscriber load, in each of their head ends or PoPs. These Verifiers act as a demarc between the access and VoIP delivery networks and between the access network and the customer premise. Providers also install Brix 1000 Verifiers in RDCs and IP partner connections, and Brix 3500T Verifiers at PSTN partner trunk connections to expand their view and further segment their VoIP delivery networks. To validate quality between head ends and the backbone or partner networks providing Class 4 services, Brix VoIP tests run continuously between Verifiers at these locations (see diagram above).
  
  Brix Verifiers deployed at the network edge originate and terminate test calls to and from the customer premise to support subscriber prequalification, post-installation verification, proactive quality monitoring, and customer care activities. To satisfy the unique requirements of each, the Brix System flexibly supports testing to a software-based Brix Agent installed at the subscriber's home, or agent-less configurations to the user's phone or VoIP telephony adaptor.
  
  The Brix VoIP Self-Help Application enables potential subscribers to easily assess likely service quality and lets existing subscribers validate ongoing quality to their homes using a cost-effective self-service model.
  
  To verify proper configuration and adequate service quality for a new VoIP installation, a technician makes a test call to the Golden Phone Verifier (or answers a call from the Golden Phone generated by a customer service representative) from the customer's phone before leaving the premise. For self-installations, subscribers similarly initiate Golden Phone testing under the direction of a self-service portal.
  
  For customer problems requiring in-depth troubleshooting, the powerful Brix VoIP Care Application assists Customer Support Representatives to easily and remotely identify each problem's cause and fix or proper escalation path.
  
  Last-mile providers also perform periodic test calls to subscriber homes to proactively identify potential customer issues or problem regions before they become hot. The subscriber's VoIP adaptor terminates these periodic calls, not the phone, so they may be performed transparently and automatically across even the largest subscriber base.

• VoIP Service Providers
  VoIP Service Providers (VSPs) transparently deliver Class 4 and Class 5 services to subscribers via broadband access networks that they do not own. These VSPs must guarantee service quality not just within their own networks, but also all the way to the broadband subscriber's home.
  
  Administrators install the BrixWorx central-site software at a data center or other centralized location.
  
  To accommodate the large call volume, the VSP deploys a Brix 2500 Verifier at each of their VoIP network ingress points. This Verifier provides a demarc between the VSP's network and the access provider's network and provides the VSP a means to test out to the customer premise (see diagram above).
  
  Like the last-mile VoIP providers, the VSPs also use Brix Verifiers deployed at their network edge to originate and terminate test calls to and from the customer premise to support subscriber prequalification, post-installation verification, proactive quality monitoring, and customer care activities. Unlike the last-mile VoIP providers, however, the VSPs do not own the last mile network and must make assumptions about its topology as they interpret test results from the subscriber.
  
  To satisfy the unique requirements of prequalification, verification, monitoring, and customer care activities, the Brix System flexibly supports testing to a software-based Brix Agent installed at the subscriber's home, or agent-less configurations to the user's phone or VoIP telephony adaptor.
  
  The Brix VoIP Self-Help Application enables potential subscribers to easily assess likely service quality, and existing subscribers to validate on-going quality to their homes using a cost-effective self-service model.
  
  To verify proper configuration and adequate service quality for a new VoIP installation, a technician makes a test call to the Golden Phone Verifier (or answers a call from the Golden Phone generated by a customer service representative) from the customer's phone before leaving the premise. For self-installations, subscribers similarly initiate Golden Phone testing under the direction of a self-service portal.
  
  For customer problems requiring in-depth troubleshooting, the powerful Brix VoIP Care Application assists Customer Support Representatives to easily and remotely identify each problem's cause and fix or proper escalation path.
  
  Last-mile providers also perform periodic automated test calls to subscriber homes to proactively identify potential customer issues or problem regions before they become hot. The subscriber's VoIP adaptor terminates these periodic calls, not the phone, so they may be performed transparently and automatically across even the largest subscriber base.
  
  To validate quality within its own network, VSPs deploy Brix 1000 and Brix 2500 Verifiers in IP core locations and Brix 3500T Verifiers at PSTN trunk connection locations.

• BrixWorx — central-site software engine
• Brix Advanced VoIP Test Suites — tests to assess signaling, delivery, and call quality
• Brix 1000 Verifier — for head-end, PoP, and partner connection locations
• Brix 2500 Verifier — for core, data center, or other high-volume locations
• Brix 3500T Verifier — for PSTN locations
• Brix 4000 Verifier — for signaling and media aggregation points throughout the VoIP network
• BrixCare Self-Service — subscriber prequalification and end-user care and troubleshooting

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