Skip to main content
All CollectionsFAQ
What is MOS?
What is MOS?

What is MOS and how is it calculated?

Andy Scott avatar
Written by Andy Scott
Updated over a week ago

MOS Score

MOS (Mean Opinion Score) is an industry-standard calculation that estimates voice quality for measured network performance.


The performance of the data network connecting Agents to the CCaaS environment is important from both voice quality and softphone performance perspectives.

Operata captures five parameters of network performance, for every second of every call:

  • Latency/Round Trip Time (RTT) - how many milliseconds do data packets take to get to and from the Agent.

    • Target: < 250 ms

  • Inbound and Outbound Packet loss - the percentage of inbound packets lost.

    • Target: < 1%

  • Inbound and outbound Jitter - now many milliseconds data arrived out of the order in which it was sent.

    • Target < 30 ms

The three inbound parameters are used to calculate the displayed MOS scores in Canvas, using the ITU-T G.107 standard, which indicates the likely quality of voice.

As importantly it indicates where network performance could have an impact on the performance of softphone features and its connectivity.

The Operata Playbooks display both the Average MOS and worst case MOS (the lowest MOS for any one second of the call).

MOS Score

Operata Network quality tag

Likely Customer and Agent impact

<=1

Poor (Red)

Very poor call quality, probably terminated early with agent softphone features and connectivity failing.

<=2

Poor (Red)

Poor call quality, difficulty in understanding the conversation with agent softphone features failing or slow to respond.

<=3

Poor (Red)

Average Call, some call quality issues audible to the customer and agent.

<=4

Average (Amber)

Good Call, Audio Quality should not have caused any concern.

<5

Good (Green)

Great Call, Perfect Audio.

Note: for AWS environments the MOS scores for periods calls are placed on hold are ignored as the AWS agent announcement source introduces high levels of latency that do not represent actual network performance.

Network performance.

Operata Playbooks display the underlying Latency, inbound/outbound Packet Loss and inbound/outbound Jitter) - both Average and Worst Case (for any one second)

The underlying inbound and outbound network performance scores are really useful as a guide to the likely impact and resolution.

Critically home-working networks are typically asynchronous, with outbound performance being far slower than inbound, knowing the network performance in both directions is important.

For example, Latency (RTT) is likely to be higher where there is a greater physical distance between the agent and the CCaaS environment, this brings more sensitivity to the performance of other network and agent environment configurations; for example PC performance, proxy server load and packet loss will have a greater impact.

Contact Operata for more details...

Did this answer your question?