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A new study suggests the quality of voice over IP is getting worse.

Brix Networks, a company that develops monitoring tools for service providers, analysed data it gathered from a free website it created two years ago called TestYourVoip.com, which allows consumers to test the quality of their VoIP services.

While it’s no secret net phone services don’t offer the same call quality as traditional phones, in its study - published on Monday - Brix discovered VoIP call quality has declined by about five per cent in the past 18 months.

With almost one million VoIP connections tested through its website, Brix said about 20 per cent of all calls had unacceptable quality. This is up from about 15 per cent of calls made about a year ago.

Kaynam Hedayat, chief technology officer for Brix, said the decline in voice quality is happening because voice services are increasingly competing for resources on the same IP network as other services such as video, music downloads and interactive gaming.

Read more: silicon.com