BOSTON--Having gained significant traction for its softswitch products among independent incumbents and competitive local exchange carriers, MetaSwitch is now focused on helping its customers improve VoIP quality and reliability through implementation of best practices and development of new industrywide requirements for service monitoring and troubleshooting.

To accomplish the latter goal, the softswitch maker announced this week that it has joined the V2oIP Quality Alliance, a group of 31 companies that was unveiled here at VON and is focused in part on defining requirements for network readiness, pre-deployment testing, in-service monitoring and troubleshooting, service level agreement definition and monitoring, and technologies for improving VoIP quality.

MetaSwitch also has seen significant growth in demand for its professional services organization, which has helped service provider customers build their VoIP networks in a way that enables reliable, quality service, said Andrew Randall, vice president of marketing at MetaSwitch.

“Our customers have told us they want the tools to find out what is going wrong when they have service problems,” Randall said. “As they build out their networks, and as those networks get more complex, they are running into more service issues.”

The problem today is that it is very difficult to do a root cause analysis of VoIP problems, because there isn’t a standard way of reporting on the quality of each call, or of getting visibility of all pieces in a network.

“The diagnostic tools are immature,” Randall said. “When something goes wrong, we can see only a bit of the call--we see the signaling but not the media flows. We need all the vendors working together to see the whole thing end to end and be able to determine what the problem is.”

Service providers need to be more proactive in monitoring the quality of calls, which they can do today, and beginning to identify the scenarios in which things go wrong, he added. There is also danger, as the number of subscribers on a network grows, that strains on bandwidth capacity will create problems.

“The service provider may be going along fine, adding customers, and then when they put the 101^st customer on the network, everything stops working,” Randall said. “Part of the best practices approach will show them how to keep track of what they are adding.”

VoIP enables a distributed architecture, with media gateways throughout the network but that distribution can make bandwidth calculation decisions more difficult, he added.

“Most of what we need to do is take what we know and get people to implement best practices,” Randall said. “There are still pieces of things we need to get a holistic view of the service, and that’s what the alliance can help with.”