MCS Satellites are available as software or hardware. Software Satellites can be installed on any server or computer within a network. Those Satellites then become testing points.
Hardware devices are connected via ethernet, so they can be placed in a data center, office, or someone's home. They are lightweight and secure and offer more in-depth metrics for analyzing a connection.
Using MCS you can set up work orders to run any number of tests between any of the satellites.
The benefit of having a variety of testing points throughout your network is to quickly and accurately determine where network problems are occurring. For example, if you find VoIP calls are failing between New York and Paris you can quickly analyze that route and find the issue.
The same Satellites that are described above can be used to enhance an online connection testing portal.
Check out our live example of satellite testing points.
With lots of focus on employees working from home, it has become very important to understand how home networks are performing.
They can also be used to pre-qualify customers for VoIP services or diagnose video conferencing issues between employees.
As discussed in use case 1 above, work orders can be created to instruct Satellites to run a series of tests. Sometimes over days and weeks if needed.
Our Satellite App (for Windows and Mac) can be easily deployed to an end user or remote location to perform a series of diagnostic tests. For example, if an employee is having issues with video conferencing at home you can have them run a basic browser connection test. If the results come back as having issues a more detailed test can be deployed using the Satellite App. The user would simply double-click it and it would connect and run the required tests.
This can be very helpful as running tests over a larger period can uncover problems that may not appear in a stand-alone browser test.
Satellite work orders are extremely flexible. They can perform tests to numerous testing points over long periods to give unparalleld insight into how a network is performing over time.
Browser-based assessment testing allows you to present a customized portal to your end-users, which allows them to assess their home or work connection.
Satellite technology. Utilize our powerful MCS Satellites (software and hardware) to create testing points across your network. Continuous testing can then be set up between any and all end-points.
Jitter time will increase proportionate to the number of packets lost and audio content will be missing. The distribution of the packets lost is a critical measure.
Most VoIP tests report packet loss as an average, for example dropping 25 packets out of a thousand would be expressed as 0.25%. Sounds like a very small number and not worth worrying about.
However, consider the problem if the 25 packets were dropped contiguously. At 50 packets per second that represents 50% of the time window.
Jitter is measure in milliseconds and a good result is 0 (zero) milliseconds and a bad result is any number other than zero. The higher the number the bigger the threat to audio quality.
As a practical human example consider two cars that leave 5 minutes apart heading to the airport. If the cars arrive 5 minutes apart then the jitter value is zero i.e. no change in time. If the trailing cars arrive 6 minutes apart the reported jitter is 1 minute.
If the jitter time is large then the second car arrives too late and misses the flight. In other words, to deliver a good experience the car must arrive in time to catch the flight.
For example on 1Gbps workstation the smallest data payload sent from a browser is about 48 packets. An connection at 12Mbps will consume 1 millisecond of time for each packet. Why is this and why does it matter?
12 million bits per second is 12,000 bits per 1ms. A data packet is normally 1500 bytes which is 12,000 bits. Therefore 48 data packets will consume 48 milliseconds of time on the network. If your VoIP packets are behind the data stream then on a 12Mbps connect your jitter peaks will be at least 48ms or higher.
Remember 48 packets is the smallest payload of data, plus there are many other workstations that send data on the network. If jitter is consistently high then the jitter buffer will drain and cause the application audio quality to diminish. Most Jitter buffers are around 80 – 100ms and increasing the jitter buffer is not a practical solution because it increases the talk-over lag time which also affects call quality.