No phone means no business. Poor quality can also lead to a loss of business. But, there are barriers to high quality Digital Phone Service. Some broadband Internet connections are less reliable than the old PSTN networks. Moreover, surges in network utilization from within the organization can drive down call quality. These are serious obstacles for any “business grade” Digital Phone Service offering. Star2Star recognized the inherent difficulty in providing a quality solution over the Internet when so many things could go wrong and effect call quality.
Star2Star has matched each and every vulnerability of Internet phone service with an End-to-End architecture that not only solves the problem but provides an even better solution than traditional phone service. This architecture provides a solution that is more robust than the PSTN by leveraging smart quality management and failover techniques that are only possible with an end-to-end solution.
Being able to control the call from both ends allows Star2Star the following capability:
Star2Star monitors the network on the customer premise and throughout the entire call path until it reaches the PSTN termination point. By measuring things such as latency, number of discarded packets and network utilization they can predict and track call quality throughout the entire Star2Star call path and adjust accordingly.
Star2Star monitors the on-site PBX called the Starbox and all of the phones. They monitor all of the equipment in their Network Operation Center (NOC). They are able to anticipate or at least know immediately when call quality begins to degrade or a component becomes unavailable. With this information they can immediately notify the customer or, in the case of a total system failure at the customer site, even route calls directly to the user’s cell phones, an alternate phone line or voice mail.
Star2Star implements Quality of Service (QOS) management on the customer’s network and at the customer network’s edge on the Star Box. Each phone will also provide QOS management for the PC data passing through it. This QOS management will guarantee the delivery of voice data before other data. This is important because even a small delay in a voice packet creates an annoying call experience. A slight delay in other data will generally never be noticed. Star2Star has determined optimal settings such as buffering to fill in if a packet shows up late. They also implement a special compression CODEC that uses minimal network bandwidth and at the same time provides smooth, high quality voice communications and interpolates missing data to improve call quality.
Star2Star only uses premium PSTN termination Services from Level-3 and their own high quality local circuits and avoid cut rate companies with dubious quality standards. Star2Star logs and tracks all system health factors, which can be reviewed later to better understand what is happening on your network during problems. Star2Star provides a service desk which is manned 24x7x365. This service desk has a web presence and a phone presence. The service desk is implemented along the lines of the ITIL standard for service desk best practices and will include: incident management (trouble tickets), problem management (incidents that collect together under one problem), knowledge management (Web based self help to find answers to common problems) and integration with the real time systems monitoring system described above to automatically open trouble tickets when a problem is sensed, possibly take automatic action to fix problems and automatically close tickets where a problem is detected as resolved. In addition, the service desk will be programmed to automatically notify and even escalate trouble tickets that meet criteria for severity and length of trouble. Reports will be generated from the system to measure effectiveness.
In short, Star2Star’s End-to-End architecture allows us to monitor the health of every phone, phone call and network component between your phone and our data center 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. We automatically adjust to changing conditions and get in touch with you when we detect a problem. The benefits? Star2Star delivers proactive and effective customer service. By placing the Star2Star phone system at your office and providing the dial tone via our own Class C network and multiple fiber connections, we shorten the routes your calls take across the Internet. This End-to-End solution solves quality issues that our competitors simply cannot solve; which means our solution provides the best voice quality available.
