Mandeville noted that, once the pilot phase, which begins in September, is complete and Iometrix and the MSF have developed a complete test process, the first group of certified vendors will be announced in the first quarter of 2008. Then, vendors will be able to register to have their gear tested on a first-come, first-served basis. The cost of each test, which Mandeville claims will "be reasonable," must be met by the vendor, which must be a member of the MSF.

    That will limit the field somewhat, as the MSF currently has only about 35 vendor members, though that list does include many of the industry's big names, such as Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU - message board), Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO - message board), Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC - message board), Fujitsu Ltd. (Tokyo: 6702 - message board; London: FUJ), Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. , Nokia Siemens Networks , Nortel Networks Ltd. (NYSE/Toronto: NT - message board), and ZTE Corp. (Shenzhen: 000063 - message board; Hong Kong: 0763).

    Quality counts

    So is this certification scheme worthwhile? And is RTCP a worthy place to start?

    Heavy Reading senior analyst Joe McGarvey thinks so. "RTP and RTCP certification seems like a fairly intelligent way to get this process started," says the analyst. "Quality is still a big concern for carriers that are moving subscriber services to IP and any effort to improve performance or at least make it easier to track down performance issues is a worthwhile effort."

    The scheme maybe limited in what it can achieve initially, though. McGarvey notes that while many of the products being tested in the pilot phase are mature, so ensuring strong participation in the initial certification cycle, "I'm a little concerned that it might be difficult to find a substantial number of SIP endpoints and other CPE products to include in the first round of testing. Product manufacturers looking to receive certification must be MSF members, and it's not clear that the certification process is incentive enough for a smaller company to join the Forum."