MOS stands for Mean Opinion Score, a formal acronym for the process of surveying a number of people on a given topic. For example, people leaving a cinema may be polled on how they would rate the film, say, on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. Once a number of people have voted the cinema may claim that the audience, on average, give it 4 stars or a MOS of 4. If the overall MOS was 2 or less then the cinema may stop showing the film. That is, they make a commercial decision based on customer experience.

In telecoms MOS ratings can be collected in much the same way. Users can be polled after every phone call and be asked their opinion of the voice quality. However, not only is the manual polling of callers very labour intensive, it doesn’t provide any insight as to the root cause.

MOSworks uses International Telecommunications Union (ITU) standard software that automatically provides a MOS rating. The benefit of the technology is that it can quickly and accurately rate the perceptual quality of telecoms systems without the need to do manual polling. Further, our experts are able to determine the root cause of voice quality problems by analysing the test data.

Not Just Another Technical Stat
Network management systems have no difficulty churning out stat-after-stat. The shortcoming is that they only provide a network operational view – and only a thin portion at that. MOSWorks provide a customer experience view such that overall business performance can be understood.

Active and Passive Measurements
MOSworks uses both Active and Passive MOS measurements to determine the customer experience level. Active measurements are useful for benchmarking the overall performance while Passive measurements provide real-time measurements.

The ITU Standards
MOSworks use the following standards as part of the comprehensive benchmarking analysis service.

• P.800 MOS Standard Scale
• P.862 PESQ
• G.107 E-Model
• P.562 CCI