BOSTON--Agilent Technologies this week unveiled what it believes is the industry’s only VoIP service assurance system that can monitor VoIP traffic end-to-end, as it traverses session border controllers and differing networks.

The Agilent NgN Analysis System is intended to allow VoIP providers to “manage the customer experience, and see and detect degradation of services prior to the generation of a trouble ticket,” said Paul Capozzoli, NgN Analysis System product manager. “We put all the information into one call record, including the signaling information, delay, loss and jitter measurements.”

By delivering a comprehensive look at service performance, Agilent is trying to help service providers be more proactive in addressing problems, he said.

“This is a very competitive space, and service providers that cannot provide availability, reliability, maintainability and service quality will lose customers--it’s so easy to switch,” he said. “This system gives the service provider visibility and enables them to correlate a call end-to-end across multiple networks, to determine quality.”

The move to IP has actually complicated the service assurance picture considerably, said Donna Bastien, OSS marketing communications manager.

“In general, we are moving into customer assurance, which uses the same information that our traditional performance assurance and measurement systems generate but from a different perspective--the view of the customer,” she said. “Service assurance systems need to become much more customer-focused, particularly in the IP world, because IP is a much less deterministic environment, and a network problem doesn’t always mean there is a customer problem. What’s most important to service providers is to be able to identify and fix what is affecting their customers.”

Worldwide, IP OSS Assurance is growing 20% a year, she said, and Agilent’s business in that realm is growing 29% a year.