Psytechnics Releases Performance Report on Microsoft’s Voice Communications

BOSTON - Psytechnics has released the results from a voice quality performance evaluation of a pre-release of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 desktop Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) solution. The study also included a comparison of the Microsoft solution to a leading IP phone from a market leader in IP telephony. Results show that calls made with the Microsoft software deliver superior voice quality to the single-purpose IP phone. These findings show that the quality of Microsoft’s offering is high enough to allow companies to integrate voice communications with PCs, which could eliminate the need to purchase expensive IP phones.

“Users have been cautious about PC desktop telephony, but our tests show that concerns about speech quality have now been addressed by software,” said Mike Hollier, CTO at Psytechnics. “This evaluation emphasizes the positive transformation that software-based VoIP solutions will have on unified communications and telephony in the future. The familiar PC can now outperform the IP phone.”

By using a single user identity across all modes of communication, companies can confidently transition to unified voice, conferencing, IM, presence, and collaboration without additional risk of reduced quality. As desktop communication continues to evolve with the incorporation of VoIP, businesses will benefit by the extension of existing telephony infrastructures.

For the evaluation, Psytechnics used speech over simulated IP network conditions to evaluate end-to-end performance, using both subjective experiments and objective measurements. Both the PC VoIP solution and the IP phone were evaluated by both real end-users (subjective) and by Psytechnics’ Quality of Experience software (objective). Both the objective and subjective evaluations identified Microsoft’s PC VoIP solution as superior in speech quality.