BT Wholesale Moot New Voice Assured Broadband Service for VoIP Calls

BT Wholesale has started consulting ISPs on the possible introduction of a new product called Voice Assured Broadband (VABB), which appears designed to optimise standard ADSL2+ and superfast FTTC (VDSL) lines for calls made via the Voice over IP (VoIP) protocol.

The new VABB service, which was first noted by the boss of AAISP (Adrian Kennard) today, seems to be some sort of value added overlay for related fixed line broadband connections that would be optimised for VoIP via some form of Service Level Agreement (SLA).

After further digging ISPreview.co.uk understands that a short trial of the new service is going to be run sometime during this quarter (Q2 2014), although we have not been able to unearth any further information (perhaps because BT hasn’t released much more than that). A request to BT was placed earlier today and we are currently awaiting a reply.

In relation to this BT are apparently asking ISPs if they offer any SLA’s that cover issues such as Packet Loss, Jitter and Round Trip Delay’s, or indeed if they have the capacity to diagnose those when they occur. It’s possible that this could touch a raw nerve with some providers, especially after the recent “3% packet loss is not considered as a fault” situation (here).