Patent ID: 7526394

Claim:
A method of assessing speech quality transmitted via a packet based telecommunications network comprising the steps of: storing a sequence of intercepted packets associated with a call, each intercepted packet containing speech data, and an indication of a transmission time of said intercepted packet; storing with each intercepted packet an indication of an intercept time of said intercepted packet; extracting a set of parameters from said sequence of intercepted packets; and generating an estimated mean opinion score in dependence upon said set of parameters; and storing said estimated mean opinion score on a computer-readable medium accessible by a user for visualization and analysis, wherein the extracting step comprises the sub steps of: generating a jitter parameter for each packet of said sequence of stored packets in dependence upon a difference between the transmission time of a stored packet and the transmission time of a preceding stored packet of the sequence; and a difference between the intercept time of said stored packet and the intercept time of said preceding stored packet; and generating a consecutive positive jitter parameter for said each stored packet in dependence upon a polarity of said jitter parameter for said each stored packet and a polarity of said jitter parameter for immediately preceding stored packets wherein the consecutive positive jitter parameter defines the number of immediately preceding stored packets which have been received consecutively, for each of which a polarity of the jitter parameter is positive, wherein said consecutive positive jitter parameter is returned to a value of zero upon receipt of a packet having a non-positive jitter value.