After months of testing a vendor’s new Media Gateway software release in their corporate lab, the operator was finally ready to deploy the release on their production network. The upgrade went as expected; the network appeared to be processing calls perfectly. However, the software upgrade introduced a new parameter for jitter processing that the operator was not aware of. While the Media Gateway still processed the calls, call quality was well below acceptable levels.

When the day shift engineer started, he accessed call quality reports from Tektronix Communications’ Media Assurance toolkit  and found that jitter measurements were well outside the normal performance range. The engineer drilled into the QoS report and easily pinpointed a key contributor to the problem - high jitter levels were being seen since the time of the upgrade. By following clear and simple workflow steps, the engineer was able to capture and play back the audio to confirm the jitter. He then captured the end to end signaling and media for the call and sent it to the equipment vendor. The vendor indicated that a newly introduced parameter had been set incorrectly, causing jitter levels to increase. The settings were corrected and the network was restored to health. 

Without the Media Assurance toolset, the operator may have had to wait for customers to call in and report their voice quality troubles before detecting the issue. By that time, the damage would have been done.  Instead, they averted a potential disaster before the morning traffic rush ever hit the network.