Verizon Business today announced new ways for its enterprise customers to insure they maintain voice quality when converging services onto a single data pipe. The new capabilities include a Service Level Agreement that guarantees voice quality and an assessment service that enables companies to better manage applications so that voice service isn’t harmed.

As more enterprise customers are converging services for efficiency and cost savings, they need to have confidence that VoIP quality can be sustained, said Julie Vance, manager for Private IP Services at Verizon Business. Network Assessment with Voice, the new service being added to Verizon’s Application Aware suite of reporting tools, offers U.S.-based multinational corporations the opportunity to evaluate their global networks and get greater visibility into how the mix of applications they are running can affect both the wide area network and the local area network, she said.

By 2009, more than half of Verizon’s largest business customers will be using VoIP, Vance added. “We are trying to address their needs in a proactive basis,” she said. “As enterprises introduce more applications onto their data networks, they also introduced new complexity for network management. We understand these challenges and their need for ongoing support on dynamically changing networks. We can help them make sure critical data and voice networks can successfully navigate networks with the appropriate QoS.”

In order to m
anage application contention, Vance said, it is critical to have visibility into voice and data applications. Verizon will provide a short-term assessment that provides that visibility so that VoIP can be deployed correctly from the outset. The Network Assessment with Voice allows customers to inventory all applications including VoIP that are running over their network and appropriate size the network to prepare for the migration to VoIP as well as troubleshoot problems on Verizon’s network or even a competitor’s network, Vance said.

Once problems are identified, the customer can choose to buy more bandwidth, implement QoS controls to limit data spikes or implement load balancing to protect voice traffice, she said.

The 45-day assessment uses software clients that reside at the customer premises. Verizon has teamed with Centrisoft to offer the service.

The new Voice SLA for Verizon’s Private IP services guarantees the monthly average Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for its EF class of service – generally used for voice – will not drop below 4.0 between designated nodes of Verizon’s network across the Private IP backbone. The MOS score is calculated based on ITU-T standards, Vance said.