MOS & Codecs

What the quality number means, and when it means nothing.

sipnab reports a MOS for every RTP stream. This page says where that number comes from, which codecs have a published basis for it, and — the part that matters during an incident — which ones do not.

The short version:

Codec	Basis	What sipnab reports
G.711 (PCMU / PCMA)	ITU-T G.113 Table I.1, Ie = 0	Narrowband MOS, grounded
G.729	ITU-T G.113 Table I.1, Ie = 10	Narrowband MOS, grounded
Opus	Treated as G.711-equivalent	Narrowband MOS, grounded
AMR-WB (G.722.2)	ITU-T G.113 Tables IV.1 / IV.3	Wideband MOS — needs the mode
AMR narrowband	No published value	Placeholder, flagged
EVS	Fullband only, SWB mode	Placeholder, flagged
G.722, G.726, iLBC, everything else	Not implemented	Placeholder, flagged

Anything in the last three rows scores 4.216 at 10 ms jitter, no loss and the assumed 100 ms one-way delay — the same value an unidentified stream gets. That is a placeholder, not a measurement.

Every door that publishes the number publishes what it is worth, in the same words:

Surface	How it says so
MCP rtp_stats	mos_grounded: false, mos_grounding: "unpublished", mos_note
GET /v1/streams	the same three keys on every row
GET /v1/streams?mos_below=	never selects an ungrounded stream, and reports ungrounded_excluded
MCP rtp_stats with min_mos/max_mos	the same refusal, and the same count
TUI stream detail	the score renders muted rather than in a quality band, annotated no published Ie
The in-browser analyzer on sipnab.com	the score renders dimmed and italic, outside the good/fair/poor scale entirely, and the summary counts what it could not score

The filters are the part that matters most. A placeholder is a high-looking number that means nothing, so a MOS bound applied without the grounding test returns every stream sipnab could not score, dressed as a bad call — and an operator working a bad-call list goes down it top to bottom.

Declaring an impairment factor sipnab does not have

If you know the Ie for a codec on your own network, declare it and sipnab scores with it:

[media.codec_ie]
G722 = 12.0
iLBC = 11.0

Keys match case-insensitively, and a declared value must be >= 0 and < 95 (at 95 the E-model’s loss term vanishes, and above it more packet loss would raise the score, so sipnab refuses the value and names the codec).

A declaration is never reported as a citation. A declared codec comes back as mos_grounded: true with mos_grounding: "operator_declared" and a note saying the figure came from this deployment rather than from ITU-T G.113. The distinction is worth keeping because the remedies differ: a published score that looks wrong means suspecting sipnab’s vantage point, and a declared one means suspecting a file on your own disk.

A codec nobody declared keeps its old answer. It still scores as the placeholder and still says so, which is the point — [media.codec_ie] makes some unknown codecs knowable and must not make the rest look confident.

Declaring one does not rescue AMR-WB. Its published values are on the wideband scale and the narrowband model cannot carry them — see AMR-WB — published, and mode-dependent below.

MOS comes from what sipnab measured, never from what the far end claimed

The jitter and loss behind the score come from sipnab’s own observation of the captured media. sipnab keeps what RTCP asserted separately and never feeds any of it to the score. Two side-tables hold it:

What the far end sent	Read it via	Carries
Reception report (SR/RR, RFC 3550)	StreamStore::remote_report	Loss fraction, cumulative loss, interarrival jitter
VoIP Metrics (XR, RFC 3611 Section 4.7)	StreamStore::remote_voip_metrics	The endpoint’s own R-factor, MOS-LQ and MOS-CQ, burst and gap densities, round-trip and end-system delay, discard rate

The XR block is the stronger evidence of the two, because it carries the endpoint’s own quality score rather than raw counters, and because its discard rate names an impairment no capture can see. A discarded packet arrived at the endpoint and the jitter buffer threw it away, so the packet appears in the file and still never reached the listener.

That makes an XR-reported MOS a third kind of number, next to a grounded sipnab estimate and a placeholder. rtp::quality::MosProvenance names all three so no surface has to guess which one it holds.

Two reasons. Nothing authenticates RTCP, so anything that can reach the port can assert a loss figure. If that figure moved the MOS, an attacker would control the quality number. And a reception report describes the path from the sender to that reporter, which on a mid-path capture is a different segment from the one in front of sipnab. The report may be perfectly true and still not describe the traffic in the file.

So a stream’s MOS may disagree with the far end’s reported MOS. That disagreement is information, not an error — it localizes the fault. If the reporter sees loss and sipnab does not, the loss happened downstream of the capture point. If sipnab measures loss and the reporter does not, it happened upstream.

Why there is more than one scale

The E-model produces an R-factor, which converts to MOS. There are three of them and they are not interchangeable:

Model	Anchor	MOS symbol	For
ITU-T G.107	Ro = 93.2	MOS_CQE	Narrowband
ITU-T G.107.1	Ro,WB = 129	MOS_CQEW	Wideband
ITU-T G.107.2	computed	MOS_CQEF	Fullband

A wideband 4.42 and a narrowband 4.35 describe different things. Do not average them, plot them on one axis, or compare them against one threshold. Feeding a wideband Ie,WB into the narrowband equation is not a rough approximation — it is a 35.8-point scale error that produces a plausible, confidently wrong number.

This is why AMR-WB is not simply added to the narrowband table alongside G.729.

AMR-WB — published, and mode-dependent

G.113 publishes an impairment factor for all nine AMR-WB modes. The spread is large enough that the mode outweighs most of the impairments this model accounts for:

Monotic listening — handset or monaural headset

G.113 (09/2024) Table IV.1.

kbit/s	Ie,WB	MOS at zero loss
23.85	8	4.42
23.05	1	4.49
19.85	3	4.48
18.25	5	4.46
15.85	7	4.43
14.25	10	4.39
12.65	13	4.34
8.85	26	4.02
6.6	41	3.51

Diotic listening — stereo headset or speakerphone

G.113 (09/2024) Table IV.3.

kbit/s	Ie,WB	MOS at zero loss
23.85	10	4.39
23.05	8	4.42
15.85	17	4.25
12.65	20	4.18
8.85	41	3.51
6.6	56	2.92

Three modes — 19.85, 18.25 and 14.25 — have no published diotic value. sipnab returns nothing for them rather than interpolating, because the series they sit in is not monotonic and neighbors do not bound them.

Two things about these tables surprise people, and both are real:

• 23.85 kbit/s scores worse than the slower 23.05. Ie,WB is 8 against 1. The inversion recurs across Tables IV.1, IV.3 and IV.4, so it reflects published intent. Do not rank AMR-WB modes by bitrate and expect quality to follow.
• Listening context is worth up to 15 R-points — about 0.59 MOS at 6.6 kbit/s. It is an explicit input with no default, because assuming one would be a bigger error than most impairments in the model.

Under packet loss, most of it is not computable

G.113 Table IV.4 publishes the loss-robustness factor Bpl,wb for three modes, diotic only, uniform loss only — 23.85, 23.05 and 12.65. G.113 states that no values exist for non-uniform loss or for monotic presentation.

So sipnab cannot score AMR-WB with packet loss on a handset from published data. It reports that rather than borrowing the diotic figure, which would silently mix two listening contexts inside one equation.

sipnab needs the mode, and the codec name does not carry it

AMR-WB alone spans Ie,WB 1 to 41 — roughly 4.49 down to 3.51. Two ways to pin it:

1. SDP a=fmtp mode-set naming exactly one mode. RFC 4867 section 8.1 numbers the modes 0–8 in ascending bitrate, so mode-set=2 is 12.65 kbit/s. A multi-mode set says what the stream may do, not what it did — senders switch mode per frame under congestion.
2. The RTP payload header, per frame.

Without one of those, sipnab flags the stream rather than guessing.

Where the wideband score appears

Surface	What it carries
GET /v1/streams	mos_wideband, mos_wideband_context, mos_wideband_unavailable
MCP stream tools	the same three fields
TUI stream detail	a MOS_CQEW row naming the scale, the mode and the listening context

The terminal row carries no quality band and no color, on purpose. The bands calibrate against the narrowband scale, so painting a MOS_CQEW with them would repeat the scale error this page spends a section refusing. A stream nobody attempted to score wideband gets no row at all, and one sipnab cannot score says why in words rather than showing a blank.

The call report and the vCon export carry no MOS of any kind, wideband or narrowband, so there is nothing on them to disagree with.

AMR narrowband — no published value

ITU-T G.113 (09/2024) has no AMR-NB row. Not in Table I.1, not in Table I.3. A whole-document search for “AMR” returns only G.722.2 (= AMR-WB) references. There is no 3GPP TS 26.071 or 26.090 citation anywhere.

Two codecs sit at coincident bitrates and are tempting substitutes:

• GSM-EFR at 12.2 kbit/s, Ie = 5
• TIA IS-641 at 7.4 kbit/s, Ie = 10

Both are close algorithmic relatives of AMR-NB modes. sipnab does not substitute them. They are different codecs with different references, and G.113 does not license transferring their values. A narrowband AMR call cannot be E-model scored from published ITU data, and saying so is the honest answer.

EVS — fullband only

G.113 Appendix V publishes Ie,fb for EVS in SWB mode, diotic, on the G.107.2 fullband scale:

kbit/s	Ie,fb	Bpl,fb
48	10.2	9.6
32	8.7	9.3
24.4	7.2	11.4
16.4	10.8	10.3
13.2	17.1	11.7
9.6	22.7	13

There is no EVS Ie,WB and no EVS narrowband Ie. EVS in NB, WB and AMR-WB-IO modes has no published value on any scale. G.113’s bridge Ie,fb ≈ Σ Ie,wb + 19 runs in one direction only. Running it backwards to manufacture a wideband EVS value counts as prohibited interpolation, and it drags the diotic assumption across with it.

If you are transcribing this table yourself: the G.113 (09/2024) PDF prints the second row as 2 kbit/s. That is a typo, corrected by ITU-T G.113 (2024) Erratum 1 (January 12, 2026) to 32 kbit/s. A pipeline built from the base PDF alone ships a mode that does not exist and omits one that does.

Provenance

• ITU-T G.113 (09/2024) Appendix I Table I.1; Appendix IV Tables IV.1, IV.3, IV.4; Appendix V Tables V.1, V.3 — plus Erratum 1 (01/2026).
• ITU-T G.107.1 (06/2019) as amended by Corrigendum 1 (01/2020). Use Cor.1: it is a complete-text publication, and the 06/2019 text alone carries a superseded Eq (7-6) written in terms of a quantity the wideband model never defines.
• ITU-T G.107.2 (03/2023) for the fullband scale.
• RFC 4867 section 8.1 for AMR / AMR-WB payload format and mode-set.

One caveat that belongs in any operator-facing report built on these numbers:

each G.113 appendix states “This appendix does not form an integral part of this Recommendation” and labels its contents “provisional planning values … intended to be updated regularly”. They are planning figures for network design, not measurements of the call in front of you. Only G.107.1 Annex A — the R-to-MOS conversion itself — is normative.

Using the model in code

sipnab::rtp::emodel_wb exposes the wideband model to anyone using sipnab as a library:

use sipnab::rtp::emodel_wb::{amr_wb_mos, amr_wb_kbps_from_fmtp, ListeningContext};

// Mode pinned by the SDP, no loss.
let kbps = amr_wb_kbps_from_fmtp("octet-align=1; mode-set=2").unwrap(); // 12.65
let mos = amr_wb_mos(kbps, ListeningContext::Monotic, 0.0);
// A computed MOS is a float: compare with a tolerance, never `==`.
// This is the crate's own `close()` bound from emodel_wb.rs — half a
// thousandth of a MOS point. The exact value here is 4.33709615132886.
assert!((mos.unwrap() - 4.3371).abs() < 5e-4);

// Same mode, monotic, with loss: not computable, and it says so.
assert_eq!(amr_wb_mos(kbps, ListeningContext::Monotic, 1.0), None);

Every lookup in that module — amr_wb_ie, amr_wb_bpl, amr_wb_mos and amr_wb_kbps_from_fmtp — returns Option, and returns None wherever G.113 publishes nothing rather than interpolating into the gap. The three arithmetic steps beside them (ie_eff_wb, r_wb, r_wb_to_mos) take numbers you already have and return an f64.