San Mateo, Calif., — June 8, 2005 — Keynote Systems (Nasdaq: KEYN), The Internet Performance Authority®, has launched the first study to benchmark the service quality of the leading providers of Internet phone services; also known as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), as perceived by end users.
The study is designed to assess the market readiness of the leading Internet phone service providers by comparing the call quality of those VoIP providers in San Francisco and New York to traditional Public Switched Telephone Networks (PSTN). The study compares the quality of Internet phone service providers based on ten performance factors to accurately benchmark typical scenarios including placing coast to coast VoIP and local PSTN calls between New York to San Francisco and back as well as calls from a VoIP-enabled phone to a traditional phone.
Additionally, the study ranks leading providers on every major factor that affects the end-user experience with Internet phone service, including service availability, outage minutes, dropped calls, audio delay, listening quality, consistency and geographic uniformity. The study also analyzes various diagnostic metrics that constitute the service performance factors and evaluates the impact of the underlying network carriers on the VoIP quality perceived by end-users.
The six leading VoIP providers included in the study are: AT&T CallVantage, Packet 8, Primus Lingo, Skype, Verizon and Vonage. To understand the impact of underlying network performance on call quality, the VoIP telephone calls are carried on three T1 networks: AT&T, Sprint, and UUNET. In addition to measuring underlying network performance, the study captures the impact of the last-mile on call quality by measuring each of the six providers on residential DSL and residential cable lines as well.
VoIP has emerged as an influential technology that promises to cut consumer phone bills and enterprise communications costs, and change the way we communicate. The Keynote rankings will help consumers and enterprises assess VoIP readiness for the major markets of New York and San Francisco and highlight market leadership among the various providers.
The market for hosted IP voice services among U.S. businesses is expected to reach nearly $60 million by the end of 2004, according to IDC which projects a compound annual growth rate of 282% to reach $7.6 billion in 2008.
“With all of the market conditions in alignment, VoIP is finally poised to overtake and replace the aging but reliable circuit switched infrastructure. Much of the recent excitement over VoIP has focused upon relatively minor deployments to the consumer market, “ says William Stofega, senior research analyst, VoIP Services, IDC. “While not down playing the potential of the consumer, IDC believes that the business market is ripe for adoption of VoIP and the features and functionalities that it promises. Although VoIP in the consumer market has attracted most of the attention thus far, the business market is where the real money will made in the next five years.”
“The competition is fierce between phone companies and VoIP providers, and is only intensifying with cable companies and carriers coming into the fray this year,” said Dharmesh Thakker, senior product manager for Keynote service level management solutions. “Though other studies quantify the cost-savings of VoIP and associated service features, the key driver behind residential adoption is the dial-tone reliability and superior voice quality with minimum disruptions that consumers have come to expect with traditional telephone service. The highly-quantifiable Keynote VoIP study sheds light on how well VoIP providers stack up relative to traditional phone service, and who is providing the best quality of service for consumers in two representative U.S. cities.”
The need for quality and accountability both to customers and to the government was highlighted in the last few weeks when the FCC voted unanimously to require carriers to provide to emergency call centers the location and telephone numbers of callers who dial 911 from Internet phones and ensure callers reach emergency dispatchers instead of non-emergency lines.
The Keynote study will highlight the areas up-and-coming providers need to pay special attention to in order to provide high service quality to end-users and attract and retain enterprise customers in their respective markets. Moreover the insight presented will help enterprises understand industry best practices, which can be implemented during their branch-office and converged customer care deployments to maximize employee productivity and customer satisfaction.
About Keynote
Founded in 1995, Keynote Systems (Nasdaq “KEYN”), The Internet Performance Authority®, is the worldwide leader in e-business performance management services. Over 2,100 corporate IT and marketing departments and 16,000 individual subscribers rely on Keynote’s portfolio of measurement and monitoring, service level and customer experience management services to improve e-business performance by reducing costs, improving customer satisfaction and increasing profitability.
Keynote is viewed as The Internet Performance Authority due to the company’s global infrastructure of over 1,600 measurement computers in more than 50 cities worldwide that capture and store on a daily basis over 60 million Internet performance measurements, frequent media citations quoting Keynote's Web performance data and analysis, the company’s market-leading Web performance indices for vertical markets and leading customer research that provides critical business insight into online customer experiences, industry trends and competitive Web strategies.
Keynote Systems, Inc. is headquartered in San Mateo, California and can be reached at www.keynote.com or by phone in the U.S. at 650-403-2400.
Keynote, The Internet Performance Authority and Perspective are registered trademarks of Keynote Systems, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. © 2005 Keynote Systems, Inc.
Editorial Contacts:
Della Lowe, Keynote, (650) 403-3233, dlowe@keynote.com
Dan Berkowitz, Keynote, (650) 403-3305, dberkowitz@keynote.com