Case Study: Global Crossing Enhances Conference Service Quality With Ditech VQA

Designed for the convergence of voice, video and data, Global Crossing’s network delivers services to more than 600 cities in 60 countries. Presently, Global Crossing serves 36 percent of Fortune 500 companies, as well as 700 carriers, mobile operators and ISPs worldwide. Among the voice, video and data services it provides is the Global Crossing Ready-Access on-demand audio collaboration network, which is used worldwide for conferencing services.

Challenges

In the global conferencing market, voice quality is a requirement for success. There is little tolerance for conference calls where participants can’t be heard clearly. Global Crossing’s mission is to deliver market-leading service, but the company found that voice quality impairments could be introduced from overseas networks, making it difficult to achieve this goal. On a limited portion of its international calls, third-party providers, cell phones, and low-quality headsets and handsets were introducing ambient noise and unwanted echo.

The Ditech Solution

Greg Ellison, director of engineering for conference networks at Global Crossing, knew he needed a fast and cost-effective solution to these problems for Global Crossing Ready-Access on-demand audio collaboration services, and he began researching solutions in mid-2006. That fall, he saw a demonstration of Ditech’s Voice Quality Assurance (VQA) solution deployed on its Broadband Voice Processing (BVP) platform and he quickly became a believer.

By deploying Ditech Networks’ voice quality solution, Global Crossing successfully implemented a voice quality strategy that mitigates background noise and eliminates echo on international conference calls before they even enter the Global Crossing network.

“Ditech engineers clearly understood the precise problems we needed to deal with, and their solutions were demonstrably superior to other solutions we had considered,” says Ellison.

Ellison’s team ordered Ditech’s VQA on the BVP platform and began a short pilot. After weeks of testing, Global Crossing began deployments during winter of 2006 in its TDM-based networks at multiple sites where trunking is aggregated with partner networks.

Global Crossing implemented three of VQA’s features:

• Acoustic Echo Control (AEC). Acoustic echo is feedback that results from poor isolation in the handset, Bluetooth device, or other phone accessory. AEC eliminates even the most severe non-linear, non-stationary echoes.

• Adaptive Noise Cancellation (ANC). ANC technology features a high-precision noise reduction algorithm that removes unwanted background noise components by up to 21dB. Background noise occurs on up to 50 percent of all mobile calls, and when introduced to a conference bridge by a mobile user, it can seriously degrade voice quality for the entire conference call.

• Enhanced Voice Intelligibility (EVI). EVI dynamically tunes the incoming speech’s spectral characteristics to provide the best possible conversational quality in high ambient noise environments.

Results

Ditech Networks’ VQA solution now optimizes voice quality for Global Crossing’s international enterprise and carrier conferencing customers.

“VQA exceeded our expectations in terms of optimizing voice quality,” Ellison says. “With the uncertainty of overseas networks and the callers’ environment, we were pleased that Ditech helped us eliminate at least 95 percent of the impairments before they even have a chance to enter our network.”