am I a good candidate for Vonage?

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: Jan 31, 2006 Posts: 7

I admit, I'm cheap. Cox Cable offers 3 levels of service and I'm content on the slowest one. I forget what speed they advertise it at, but here are various test results:

At testyourvoip, this was one of my LOWEST scores:

From me to boston:
MOS 3.4 / 5.0(Best with G.711 is 4.4)

Degradation Sources Codec 0.58 36.5%
Latency 0.00 0.0%
Packet Discards 1.00 63.5%
Packet Loss 0.00 0.0%

Codec G.711 (PCM at 64kbps, 20ms RTP payload, 80kbps IP BW)
Round-TripLatency 116 ms
Packet Discards 2.9%
Packet Loss 0.0%
Loss Periods Min: 20 ms
Avg: 20 ms
Max: 40 ms
Random Loss

Jitter Min: 0 ms
Avg: 3 ms
Max: 37 ms

Signaling Quality Post-Dial Delay 70 ms
Call Setup Time 90 ms
Media Delay 260 ms

From boston to me:

MOS 4.3 / 5.0(Best with G.711 is 4.4)

Degradation Sources Codec 0.57 79.5%
Latency 0.00 0.0%
Packet Discards 0.09 12.2%
Packet Loss 0.06 8.2%

Codec G.711 (PCM at 64kbps, 20ms RTP payload, 80kbps IP BW)
Round-TripLatency 116 ms
Packet Discards 0.4%
Packet Loss 0.3%
Loss Periods Min: 20 ms
Avg: 20 ms
Max: 20 ms
Random Loss

Jitter Min: 0 ms
Avg: 1 ms
Max: 30 ms

Signaling Quality Post-Pickup Delay 162 ms
Call Setup Time 128 ms
Media Delay 193 ms

next I ran an Adelphia speed test, it about 255Kbps both ways.

Finally the speed test of this site said:
My Results
Download 258,384 bps
Upload 256,392 bps
QOS 95%
RTT 68 ms
MaxPause 333 ms

So my question is, could I support one line, 2 or 3 phones? My speed isn't great, but what about the other numbers? I would want it to sound as good as a land line and I am hoping my high QOS number will give me that. Will the MaxPause mean there will be a big delay though???

Thanks
Brian

Posts: 3198 · Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 8:36 pm Post subject:

uh, I don't think it's going to be like landline with your discards and all, but the speed should be alright as long as you don't saturate your connection while on the phone, which I doubt you do or you would have a higher tier.
your qos number doesn't mean much. if it was below 40 or 50% it might become an issue, but that's just a guess since it's so hard to get info on that calculation. but fwiw all it measures is the "stability" of your connection (download). so if you downloaded a 1 megabyte file, your speed stayed at 258,384bps 95% of the time, or something like that. you could have 1bit per second and get 100% qos as long as it stayed at 1bps the entire download.

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: Jan 31, 2006 Posts: 7

Can I do anything to get that discard percentage lower? What about the packet loss?

Thanks
Brian

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: Jan 31, 2006 Posts: 7

FWIW: I just checked with the cable company, and they do advertise it as 256k up and down.

Posts: 1179 · Member of the Week Joined: Feb 28, 2005 Posts: 1179

There is nothing like experimentation. Why not try it and there is a money back guarantee and you'll only be out the amount for shipping and handling and perhaps an activation fee which if you vigorously object, they might be willing to waive it.

You would definitely want to lower the bandwidth since your speeds are a bit low. it is defaulted to 90 kbps which is a superior sound quality. Even 50 kbps is consider better than a landline. 30kbps is considered an equivalent. So if you are a risk taker, why not try it. No about of data analysis can answer your questions fully.

Posts: 2257 · Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2006 9:55 am Post subject:

Your overall speed is relevant, but just barely. What is important is the speed that is available for services like Vonage.

Vonage at best quality takes 90kbps, so if you do NOTHING else on your Internet connection, then you should be able to support 2 lines with a "reasonable" factor for overhead. Three lines would be pushing it, at best quality.

However, Voip requires a low-latency (low delay) connection. Your numbers on your "worst" test show some minor, though not fatal, issues. The first thing I'd do is shut down Internet access for everything, unplug everything from any routers you might have, etc, and run the speed test on a dedicated connection.

If you still have latency/quality issues then, you have to deal with those with your ISP. Voip requires a good solid connection.

If everything works great on a dedicated connection, then your problem is your router or other network equipment, or local traffic getting in the way. At that point, you need to make the most out of every scrap of bandwidth available to you, and QoS is what you want to look into ( http://vonage.nmhoy.net/qos.html )

In my case, my ISP offers only 256k up (I have 3mbps down), and I like to use BitTorrent and have a lot of things going on with my connection, so working QoS is a *MUST* for me.

But, as a previous poster said, Vonage does offer the 30-day money back guarantee, and there's nothing like a real, live test.

Just DO NOT port over your regular telephone number yet. Try out Vonage for a few weeks with a new number, then you can port over your regular telephone number when you're sure it's going to work for you. It'll cost you an extra $10 that way, but if Vonage doesn't work out, you won't lose your phone #.

Posts: 60 · Full Forum Member Joined: Jan 29, 2006 Posts: 60

I agree with everything that NateHoy says, but I just wanted to clarify one thing. Vonage does port out numbers (often faster then they get them from the original carrier), but it probably wouldn't be worth the hassle for an extra $10.

Posts: 2257 · Posted: Wed Feb 01, 2006 11:13 am Post subject:

ausbeer - good point, though there have been intermittent reports of them NOT releasing phone numbers, too. Better to keep control of your phone number until you KNOW Vonage works, just to be safe... Wink

Posts: 60 · Full Forum Member Joined: Jan 29, 2006 Posts: 60

Like I said not worth it for $10.29, I just didn't want to scare people who may think about going back to another carrier.

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: Jan 31, 2006 Posts: 7

Had some more time to test.
Ran testyourvoip to boston and san jose, with and without my router in place. The results were the same on average whether the PC was straight into the cable modem or plugged into my router.

Also, the results I saw were once again in line with what I posted above. Roughly speaking- only thing that varied is this time I could not get any packet loss to show up, always 0.0%.

From me to Boston, I had about 2% packet discards most of the time, occasionally going up to 3%. From Boston to me, packet discards were around 0.1% most of the time, peaking at 0.4% over many runs.

Is the 3% packet discard on the UPstream going to cause degradation to the voice quality?? I know you guys said "why not just try it, since they have a trial period" but I want to have some sense of whether this has a chance of succeeding.

If 3% discard stinks then I would first want to try to get my cable company to look into the issue, before I buy the Vonage. Cause once I do the clock on my 30 days is ticking!

Thanks for your suggestions so far, very good stuff!

brian