American and international telecommunications service providers today purchase termination services from a large number of carriers around the world. As previously centralized national telecommunications networks have opened to increasing competition, the number of network routes available for the termination of both domestic and international traffic has increased worldwide. This trend has been especially apparent since the mid-1990s during which time the deregulation of parts of American and other telecommunications networks engendered a dramatic increase in the number and quality of independent telecommunications carriers servicing the American market.
Additionally, foreign telecommunications markets have been deregulated and telecommunications markets have transitioned from the single government-owned incumbent carriers to a collection of multiple separate carriers.
This increased carrier penetration of different world telecommunications markets has given American telecommunications service providers a greater number of options for the termination of international telecommunications traffic than was previously available, along with lower costs of termination to many international destinations, especially in the developing world. Unfortunately, however, a growing number of the less costly options now available to American service providers for the termination of international traffic frequently fail to deliver a quality of service comparable to more costly established international carriers. Thus American and other telecommunications service providers interested in the cost savings associated with smaller, independent international carriers must guard against the potentially damaging impact of poorly qualified secondary routes to customer perceptions of quality.
Existing systems and methods to measure and manage quality of service are limited in several important ways. Some quality of service measurement and management methods equate network quality with a measure of Answer-Seize Ratio (ASR) either in part or in whole. However, experience has shown that small, independent carriers providing low-cost routes to the developing world may accidentally misrepresent or intentionally falsify release cause codes transmitted as part of the SS7 and ISDN telecommunications signaling protocols. For example, carrier substitution of a network congestion cause code in place of a user busy cause code may reclassify an unanswered call as a non-attempted call, thereby raising the measure of ASR for the carrier in question. Another limitation of quality of service measurements relates to ASR, PSC (percentage of short calls) and similar measures which express call quality as a ratio over total calls and can give inaccurate results over small samples. For example, a single caller repeatedly calling the same number to some low volume international destination may disproportionately raise or lower measures of ASR or PSC for the destination over a small sample of calls. As quality of service correction in realtime sometimes necessitates relatively small call samples, realtime quality correction may confound quality of service management systems predicated on ASR or PSC alone.
Thus, there exists a need to provide new and improved systems and methods that permit telecommunications service providers to measure and manage end-user perception of quality of service. A need has arisen to effectively address the needs of modem telecommunications service provides, in which such systems and methods must measure voice traffic quality of service to places in both the developed and developing worlds without reference to the special messaging parameters included in SS7, ISDN and other signaling protocols, and must correct for the skewing of repeated caller-to-caller dialing and must further afford comparison between different carriers terminating to the same destination.