General Questions
- What is VoIP Spear?
- VoIP Spear is an online VoIP Quality Test and Call Quality Monitoring service, perfect for personal use, businesses using VoIP, or service providers.
- How does VoIP Spear work?
- VoIP Spear sends network traffic to your VoIP endpoints at regular intervals. We monitor the performance of your VoIP connectivity and grade this according to pre-determined performance thresholds. From this, we can estimate the quality of a VoIP call under these network conditions.
- How can I tell how good or bad my VoIP quality is?
- We regularly test your VoIP call quality and estimate your VoIP service’s performance using using MOS (Mean Opinion Score), the industry's standard way of rating VoIP QoS. MOS is a number from 1 (bad) to 5 (excellent).
- Will I have to install any software on my computer or server?
- No. VoIP Spear is completely automatic and online. You don't have to install anything on any computer or server to begin monitoring VoIP call quality.
VoIP Quality Measurement
- What is MOS (Mean Opinion Score)?
- Mean Opinion Score is a number between 1 (poor quality) and 5 (excellent quality). It provides an indication of the quality of a VoIP call. MOS is the most common method for determining VoIP service quality.
- What IP addresses does VoIP Spear use?
- The testing servers we use depends on how you have set up your VoIP call quality tests. To obtain the IP addresses, go to your list of endpoints and then edit an endpoint. At the bottom of the page, you will see a section titled "Servers." You can see the IP addresses of our servers in this section.
- How accurate is VoIP Spear?
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Technically speaking, MOS is an 'opinion' score. The true way to calculate MOS is to have a panel of human beings listen to a VoIP call and rate it between 1 and 5. The MOS is the average of these scores. Obviously, this is an expensive and time-consuming way to measure speech quality.
VoIP Spear uses a method called the E-Model to estimate MOS based on network characteristics. The E-Model is a computational model published by the ITU-T for estimating MOS. It is a reliable method for estimating MOS based on network characteristics.
Pricing
- How much does it cost?
- Take a look at our price plans for more information about this. Also note that our Personal plan is free of charge and lets you monitor one VoIP endpoint.
- Will you always offer a free service?
- We plan to offer our Personal plan as a free service. This will likely be limited in some way (e.g., only one VoIP test).
- If I cancel my VoIP Spear account, will I get my money back?
- Yes. We believe in treating our customers fairly. If you don't use our service, we will refund you for the unused portion.