An idea to investigate #1: displaying current quality

Lars Aronsson in e-mail to the elektrosmog mailing list on 25 October 2002, ask if it would be possible to have a utility which would run in the background and display roundtrip time and jitter. He suggests displaying a "... `signal quality" meter on the screen, a simple dial from 0-3 (red, useless for VoIP), 4-7 (yellow, OK) to 8-10 (green, excellent)."
Consider how you might use the information from the RTCP traffic to provide such feedback. Could you provide this via XML to a Cisco 7960 phone in real-time? Could you provide it at the end of a call, just as there is an application which queries the user after a call about the quality and uses this to compute a MOS rating.

If you have a VoIP call taking place why not use the statistics from RTCP to tell you about current quality?

For example you could use something like:

Note that most of these were done for multicast sessions, but of course could be adapted to work with just unicast traffic. The full list of Multicast tools is at: http://www.caida.org/tools/measurement/Mantra/other-tools/other-tools.html

If you wanted a Java tool see: http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/jmf/2.1.1/support-rtp.html

See also Andreas März and Roya Ulrich, "JAM: A Java Toolkit for Traffic: Analyzing and Monitoring" http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/ftp/pub/techreports/1996/tr-96-029.ps.gz

Note this won't tell you "if" you should make a call, but just about the quality during a call. Of course you could use a probe in advance of making a call to see if you are likely to have enough quality to make a call, but this is more a matter of "admission" control.