Polycom VVX 5.5.2 QoE Reports

It's no secret that I've been hard on Polycom VVX phones in the past (especially with the lack of local Normalization rules processing). But I will say with the version 5.5 release they have come a long way on addressing some key issues and making the phone a decent replacement for the old Aries sets (Polycom CX Series).

Today, I'm excited to share that I've verified that Polycom VVX 5.5.2 now produces QoE reports just like the SfB/Lync PC Client. This means if you have Lync, Skype for Business on-premises or Skype for Business CloudPBX, they all will start showing reports for VVX phones.

If you look at the release notes, QoE Reporting actually was in 5.5.1 but at least for my customer there was a problem with that release that prevented deployment. My guess is there are a lot of people out there that haven't updated to 5.5 because what they have just works.

I am super excited about QoE reporting for VVX because it was a huge hole that was missing in the story. It's really hard to explain to customers that they have these great phones, but there is no way to see how they are performing on a call-by-call basis with what SfB provides out of the box (Polycom has some solutions of course). 

This also means that other tools like EventZero, IR Prognosis, Nectar, etc can now have more complete reporting on these devices.

Here are a couple of screen shots of how the information looks in Monitoring Server for VVX phones. The VVX was the Calee side of the call in these examples.

One of the things I noticed right off the bat is that the Codec report is G711Mu instead of the typical PCMU for G.711 Mulaw. It's minor... but it is a diff. 

On the device metrics, it seems on par with other devices providing good information on how the audio performance of the device is doing.

Anyway... I hope you are already downloading the firmware so you can go see for yourself what you've been missing... Later