Despite the features that make Voice over IP so attractive from the standpoint of cost and flexibility of telephone services, businesses will only adopt it once they’ve determined whether, and under what circumstances, the quality of VoIP will be satisfactory to users. In these pages you’ll find everything you need to know to answer those questions, both now and in the future as other packet-switched voice services emerge.

This in-the-trenches guide supplies you with all the tools you need for VoIP service quality analysis, including explicit directions for:
* designing subjective tests and interpreting results
* selecting, extending, and applying speech distortion and multiple effects models
* examining call set-up times for IP telephony
* determining requirements for multimedia exchanges.

Without hokum, hype, or obscure tech talk, Hardy delivers solid information on means of measuring, assessing, and improving VoIP quality. He gives you expert information and hands-on specifics, showing you:
* The factors that can create a negative caller experience and how packet switching affects them
* What to look for in assessing VoIP quality
* How to elicit and interpret user evaluations of voice quality
* How to estimate likely user perception of voice quality by objective test and analysis
* When and how to apply alternative quality measurement techniques to overcome quality shortfalls.

Get wireline quality from VoIP service with clear guidance from a world-class expert in analysis of service quality.

About the Author
Dr. William C. ("Chris") Hardy is the erstwhile principal analyst for quality measurement and analyses at WorldCom. He has a Ph.D. in mathematics and nearly 35 years' experience in operations analysis of communications and computer-based decision support systems gained in the course of: a 13-year career in analyses of military communications systems begun when he joined the Center for Naval Analyses in 1967; 2 1/2 years at Satellite Business Systems as Assistant Director for Systems Measurements; and more than 13 years at MCI/WorldCom, where his principal role was to serve as corporate "fair witness" for service quality, producing, where necessary, operationally meaningful, scientifically defensible analyses of the quality of WorldCom services and their relative position in the highly competitive telecommunciations marketplace. He holds 12 patents for telecommunications test technology and has 9 other active patent applications for innovations in test and analysis of commercial telecommunications services.

Dr. Hardy has authored a 1975 treatise for the U.S. Navy entitled "Operational Test and Evaluation for Communications Systems"; and QoS: Measurement and Evaluation of Telecommunications Service Quality, released in June 2001 by John Wiley and Sons. His column "Telecom Tips and Quality Quandaries" appearred regularly in QSDG Magazine, the official magazine of the Quality of Service Development Group of the ITU, while it was published, and he continues the discourse in the electronic version of the magazine. His other publications include three articles in academic journals, including two in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a paper in GLOBECOM '85, entitled "Subjective Voice Quality Evaluation in a Satellite Communications Environment."

He is an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Science.