Martello BLOG : Mitel Performance Analytics

Find the Cause of Voice Quality Issues Faster with MPA 3.1

While VoIP has come a long way in the last few years, issues with latency, jitter and delay are still a big problem when it comes to voice quality. Poor-quality business phone service is embarrassing and frustrating for everyone on the call.

In a recent UK study*, 65% of consumers will hang up if they experience poor voice quality on a call. For those calling about a new product or service, they will likely call a competing company instead. “Stress” is the most commonly used word when consumers were asked to explain how they felt after a poor voice quality call. The same report indicated that only 1 in 6 organizations have appropriate tools to monitor poor voice quality issues or plan to install them over the next 12 months. Of the Call Centers surveyed, 72% can’t find the root cause of the problem and have issues regularly.

There are many reasons why poor voice quality may be occurring and finding the source of the issue can be both time-consuming and costly. The new Mitel Performance Analytics 3.1 Voice Quality Report will provide you with all the information necessary to maintain optimal network performance. This new report will identify the percentage of users that have been experiencing poor voice quality with daily trends. This simple, intuitive dashboard is built directly into MPA 3.1 and requires no external downloads or applications. 

Features:

• Colour-coded visuals to help quickly determine network status
• Scheduled report options will deliver a PDF copy directly to your inbox
• Measures both Internal and External call quality
• Monitors teleworker units
• Unique patented formula to determine voice quality scores
• Quickly print the report from within the application

MPA 3.1 not only tells you that you have a voice quality problem, but begins the initial steps to help and diagnose the source of the problem.

1. Where the problem is: container, sub-container, subnet, internal/external calls 2. Who is affected: how many, which site, teleworkers or internal employees 3. How bad it is: a score is given that represents the number of users with good quality.

Determining the overall health status of your network and displaying the origins of the voice quality problems, saves time by starting your troubleshooting in the right place. This new Mitel Performance Analytics 3.1 Voice Quality Report provides Network Administrators with more in-depth information to help manage their network better. The report also quickly determines if any recent network changes have an impacted VQ. Creating a positive voice quality experience for users doesn’t have to be challenging and expensive. Download and learn how the Voice Quality Report in MPA 3.1 will improve your phone system.  

*https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20100920005225/en/Survey-79-Percent-Consumers-Experienced-Poor-Voice

CASE STUDY: Bermuda College

Bermuda College is “the” community college and the only higher education institution in Bermuda. The college was established in 1974, has almost 1400 students, 52 staff and has a campus that is spread out over 26 acres. Applied Computer Technologies (ACT) is Bermuda’s largest Information Technology (IT) Company. With over 55 employees including a fully diversified IT Professional division focused on Microsoft/Networking/Infrastructure solutions, ACT is well suited to meet all of the corporate needs of current and future clients. Established in 1983, ACT has served the Bermuda corporate market for over 30 years.

Situation

Bermuda College has been a satisfied ACT customer for many years and is also a Mitel telephony user. In Spring 2019, the College began experiencing regular call quality issues on external and internal calls. Any call more than a minute would have robotic sounding voices and the call would almost drop out before returning to normal after a couple of minutes. The issue was further complicated by the fact that it was not consistent (sometimes it would be every other call, sometimes it would start after 2 minutes) making the troubleshooting process trickier. As one might imagine, the College was frustrated and concerned about their business continuity.

Solution

Voice quality can be impacted by many different variables and in a complex network, just the time it takes to isolate the issue can consume valuable resources. For most, troubleshooting voice quality (VQ) problems takes time, can be difficult to pinpoint and is a constant challenge for IT professionals. Often, these issues arise because of other problems on the network but the bottom line is that it’s the Vendor’s responsibility to find and fix them.

Mitel Performance Analytics (MPA) is a unified communications (UC) performance analytics solution designed to monitor and manage today’s complex networks. Providing a smooth user experience with less downtime, this fault & performance management software, with a special focus on voice quality, MPA has been proven in more than 5,000 networks.

For weeks there was finger-pointing between the telephony team and the network team as the exact issue was not clear and the Mitel logs only went back a short time making it difficult to determine when the issue started. ACT was able to rule out the telephony system as the culprit by using call quality statistics in MPA to determine the exact time frame for when the issue started. The detailed voice quality reports pinpoint exactly where issues lie, eliminating the laborious and excessive use of resources to locate the issue. Armed with MPA graphs and reports, ACT was able to convince the networking team that the issue was in the network and not with the phone system. As the networking team made changes (“fixes”) to the network, ACT used MPA to verify if the changes improved VQ without actually having to go onsite.

The issue was quickly identified as a network loop caused by someone plugging a device in to the network. MPA was able to verify the fix by indicating “all green” on the graphs. Without using MPA, the verification method would have taken considerable time as end-user feedback from the College would be required.

Conclusion

Networks are increasingly complex and users need to have clear visibility across their network using real-time monitoring tools like MPA. MPA gave ACT the confidence in knowing that the poor VQ issues were actually caused by a network issue and not a telephony issue. Although not required, ACT did some onsite troubleshooting, to further prove to the networking team that the phones and phone system were definitely not the cause of the issue. Once the network issue was found and resolved, MPA confirmed that VQ had been restored. The customer hasn’t raised any further issues since.

For ACT, they were able to quickly determine the issue was not with the Mitel system. Without MPA, they could have spent weeks or even months testing and troubleshooting the telephony system looking for a problem that never existed! Considerable costs were avoided (ie: employee time, vehicle expenses, fuel costs, equipment use, tools and so on) and they were able to maintain their high-quality service level to an important customer.

Since the incident, ACT has elected to initiate the MPA Comprehensive NOC dashboard which projects the status of all their customers on one view on a large whiteboard at their facility. The NOC dashboard includes a location map of all clients, the real-time status of each client, a filterable alarm panel, voice quality and SIP voice quality panels. This now provides ACT with a global and comprehensive view of all their clients enabling them to react quicker or even be proactive to their client’s needs.

Download the Case Study