ETSI (the European Telecommunications Standards Institute – known for its globally adopted mobile communication standards like UMTS, LTE or TETRA) has published a new technical report on media KPIs for voice communications. The standard released by ETSI in March 18, 2021, sets out a framework for Timeslicing KPIs for RTP based speech transmission.
The technical report (TR) is the result of collaboration between tier-1 telco providers supported by government agencies and industry partners such as Voipfuture.
It is the first standard that defines meaningful service performance KPIs for the media plane, thus complementing the widely used SIP signaling KPIs defined in RFC 6076.
The issues of volatility in speech transmission performance and varying call durations lead to some drawbacks like loss of temporal detail, lack of comparability and problematic aggregation. They are addressed by timeslicing measurement methods, which analyse RTP flow characteristics for fixed time segments.
Such timeslicing methods generate metrics that allow to calculate speech transmission KPIs based on media volume. Annex A of TR 103 639 defines a set of KPIs (i.e. the Good Minute Ratio, GMR) as an industry standard. These KPIs offer a Bird’s Eye View on Voice Service Performance.