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CHICAGO--Acterna has added voice-over-IP capabilities to its NetComplete Service Assurance Solution, the company announced this week. The product enhancement means service providers can take advantage of Acterna’s correlation of passive monitoring capabilities with active probing features to get a comprehensive view of VoIP performance.

“VoIP poses a big problem,” said Roger Lingle, vice president of marketing for Acterna’s service assurance solutions division. “Voice is sensitive to additive problems. You can have latency in one device, and looking top down, a device may add only a little bit of delay--nothing to worry about. But with three to four devices doing the same thing, that’s an additive problem that can affect the end-user. We complement the network element view with an end-to-end service view of quality.”

NetComplete not only provides the tools for performance monitoring, but also does active simulation of VoIP calls to assess network performance.

The challenge for service providers is to first be able to identify the service degradation but then also be able to quickly isolate and address the problem, Lingle said.

“Without IP fault isolation, trouble-shooting and deep packet analysis--you will have traditional issue of knowing there’s a problem but not knowing how to solve it,” he said. “Service providers need to see the problem and know how bad is it, who is affected, is it a customer issue, is it affecting everyone out of this DSLAM, or every customer in a specific part of the network. What we are providing is that comprehensive view.”

Acterna’s target market is companies using VoIP to be primary-line replacements, as opposed to best-effort services. The VoIP capability is provided as part of NetComplete, a full-featured OSS with many other applications, or as a separate module with open APIs that can feed information into a higher level OSS.