VoIP Spear: New VoIP QoS Monitoring Service

Earlier this week I found a newly launched VoIP QoS monitoring service called VoIP Spear. It works by sending a ping to the end-point in question at a certain interval, then analyzing the timing of the resulting responses. The service is free for monitoring a single end-point so I setup an account and pointed it at my office IP address.

It didn’t work initially as my m0n0wall router was set to block ICMP, so no response at all to ping requests. I later added a rule to the firewall to allow it to response to pings. After that VoIP Spear started reporting that it could see my address.

The report reminds me a lot of ping plotter, which had always been a favorite tool. However, VoIP Spear is oriented the other direction, pinging my LAN from an external vantage point. Also, it provides an interpretation of the results as a traditional telecom MOS score.

We’ll see just how useful the monitoring service might be. The companies blog has a interesting initial post describing the significance of various network measurement to VoIP QoS.