Businesses depend on critical communications to connect to customers and drive internal initiatives. Accordingly, cloud-based phone systems need to deliver reliability across locations and devices so that employees enjoy coherent conversations regardless of their work style or geography. Jumbled and discordant conversations slow down work and become a barrier to moving business forward in a timely manner. 8x8 Work Apps give teams access to the highest quality voice on desktop and mobile devices and ensure a consistent experience for all users.

Even the most reliable cloud voice service will experience technical difficulties due to the network you are using. A poor network connection on either side of the conversation can cause issues on calls - from poor audio quality to dropped calls. In most cases when this happens users are left with only a guess as to the reason for the disruption. Instead, 8x8 helps our customers take the guesswork out of poor audio quality with the ability to view call quality details of the other party in addition to the user's own call quality status. This call quality indicator is displayed on desktop, iOS and Android 8x8 Work apps.

The Call Quality Indicator

The call quality indicator helps users understand the nature of network issues.

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8x8 Work Desktop App

Call quality is described to users by displaying key indicators: audio quality, quality score, packet loss, and jitter. The following explains the impact of each of the call quality attributes displayed in the call quality indicator.

Audio Quality

The audio quality score is a general score that shows whether the connection is good, average or poor. This indication is based on packet loss during a certain period of time. By measuring the packet loss during time periods and presenting this information, users can learn more about connection issues that might occur during a call.

Quality Score

The quality score shows the quality of inbound and outbound traffic during the call. This will help users understand whether a network issue is occurring with traffic that originates from outside their network or traffic that originates from their network.

Packet Loss

Packet loss is the loss of data packets as the call is taking place on the network connection. When users experience choppy audio, dropped calls, or miss entire pieces of the conversation, they are experiencing packet loss. By presenting this information to users, they will have clarity on reasons for disrupted audio during the call.

Jitter

Jitter is the variation in time delay of data packets sent over the network connection. Time delays occur as data packets are sent over the network, it is when these delays vary that conversations suffer to the degree that conversations become difficult.

Understanding these attributes enables users to see more context on network issues if audio disruptions occur and take the necessary action if issues continue over time in the same locations. This information gives users and admins the data they need to make decisions about network infrastructure, devices used and even locations where calls take place. Providing these insights in real-time gives users more transparency and thereby trust in the reliability of their communications platform.

8x8 and Reliability

While network issues will happen over time, consistently poor audio quality is intolerable. Since 8x8 owns our technology stack, we deliver a consistent high quality user experience as we actively monitor each and every call, accounting for variations in network traffic and conditions. Our focus is to mitigate network issues to support the fluid, coherent conversations that move your projects forward.

The 8x8 platform has an industry leading financially backed 99.999% uptime SLA to meet the standards of organizations that require the highest levels of reliability across distributed offices and teams. Our high-availability systems include multiple redundant active-active hot spare hardware and software systems and redundant processes with no risk of single points of failure. Our service is delivered from resilient cloud architecture across 35 public/private data centers world-wide. Given our attention and focus on system reliability, it follows that we make an effort to provide transparency around call quality by giving users visibility into call quality data. For more information on 8x8 beyond call quality visit the business phone system section of our website or our support page.