BroadSoft: "It's Hammer Time!

I've railed on and on about the importance of VoIP performance testing. The key issue, end users and vendors keep telling me, is to make lab testing as true-to-life as possible.

That's no different an aspiration than those goalsheld by generations of laboratory denizens in almost any endeavor. Yet as computational power increases, that goal of accurate, real-world testing is proving far less elusive.

We're seeing VoIP providers buy into this notion. As evidenceof that, some big, related news happened in the space today.

BroadSoft, an application software and platform provider for nearly 100 VoIP carriers, has selected a suite of testing utilities from Empirix.

The utilities, Hammer FX, Hammer NXT and Hammer Call Analyzer, provide what Empirix calls the ability to "perform a complete range of conformance, feature and scalability tests on its products, under a wide variety of 'real-world' network scenarios and carrier-class loads."

Have you ever tested VoIP before you "went" live? Are the testing protocols and metrics as true-to-life as they ought to be? Post a TalkBack.