

Hosted VoIP solutions provider Aptela has announced that its working with ClearSight Networks’ Network Time Machine (NTM) to diagnose problems on customer and carrier networks.

Matt Smith, vice president of technology and client services at Aptela, said the solution allows them to quickly and easily maintain network uptime and stave off unexpected outages.

Since Aptela works with so many customer and carrier networks in addition to its own network, it used to be nearly impossible to pinpoint specific issues and their origins.

He said NTM works like a metal detector for finding needle-in-a-haystack problems across all points within the network.

"Now, with ClearSight’s NTM, we can take retroactive network data, pull up metrics on any call, and identify the source of the problem.



"We are able to resolve issues and performance bottlenecks for our customers and carriers faster, more accurately and with less overhead."

As a hosted-PBX and VoIP service provider, Aptela routes customers’ voice and data traffic via the Internet.

For SMBs with limited IT resources and budgets, this method provides the benefits of a scalable and powerful VoIP system without the associated price tag.

However, it also means that Aptela does not have visibility into the network hardware at each customer location. Smith said that using ClearSight’s NTM and pre-established metrics, the company now has greater insight and better visibility into any VoIP call, fax, email or phone registration over the network—and may quickly identify possible causes of latency, jitter and other call quality problems.

Hosted VoIP services are on a strong growth trajectory, with a recent Infonetics Research report showing that the VoIP services market grew 33 per cent to USD $30.8 billion in 2008.