Carolina Digital Phone is using the ISP/Professional VoIP Spear to monitor VoIP quality of service with ping/ICMP to end-user's endpoints.  If VoIP Spear servers are experiencing 100% packet loss to your endpoint, it's likely because your firewall or router is blocking this traffic.  VoIP Spear follows the E-Model (ITU-T Recommendation G.107) to calculate MOS.  The E-Model takes into account packet loss, latency, and jitter. The solution is for you to open up ping/ICMP. 

MOS, which stands for Mean Opinion Score, is a score indicating the perceived quality of a VoIP call.  MOS can range from 1 (very poor) to 5 (excellent).

Technically speaking, MOS is an "opinion" score.  This means that the correct way to measure MOS is by asking a number of people to analyze a voice call and then rate it from 1 to 5.  The average score will be the voice call's MOS.

Over time, MOS has become the VoIP industry's standard way of measuring voice quality.  It is very expensive (not to mention impractical) to assemble a number of people to rate the quality of VoIP calls, so methods have been developed to estimate MOS based on the characteristics of a network connection.  This is what VoIP Spear does.

If you have a router/firewall you will need to open ping/ICMP for these IPs for the monitoring to work correctly:

Central (209.20.73.234)
East (97.107.131.83)
West (74.207.244.81)
Gbro (208.53.3.3)

We do not monitor 100% of our VoIP customers 100% of the time. We use this tool during the initial setup of your service and when you report troubles with the quality of our service.

If you want to monitor your connection VoIP Spear offers a free service at www.voipspear.com. The Personal Plus plan is a special VoIP Spear plan created for users on the Personal plan who wish to enjoy the features of our paid plans but only need to monitor one endpoint.

Here are the features of the Personal Plus plan.

• VoIP Spear servers test to your endpoint every 5 minutes (instead of every 15 minutes like the Personal plan provides)

• Access a full week's worth of test data (whereas the Personal plan only gives you 1 day).

• Receive Email Alerts when your endpoint is having QoS problems.  Email Alerts are not enabled on the Personal plan

Toepoke Software, the company that created VoIP Spear, has a very specific mandate to provide web services/software that follows the freemium business model.  They do this because we believe it's the best way of selling our software.  They are confident that their software is compelling enough that they can create a business around it, despite the fact that some of our users are not paying for the software.  Besides that, they are big fans and users of freemium software ourselves.