An apparatus (1240), method, and computer program to assess VoIP speech quality (130) using access to degraded signals is provided. Different types of impairment (110) have different effect, on speech quality. Preferred embodiments address up to four different types of impairment that affect VoIP signal quality: packet loss (230), speech clipping in time (850), noise (1400) and echo. An overall assessment algorithm factors in degradation due to various impairment factors to generate an overall speech quality assessment score or value.