Poor sound quality - WRTP54G to blame?

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 18, 2006 Posts: 4

I've been banging my head on a wall with a Vonage related problem lately and I'm hoping that a new perspective may shed some helpful light on the situation. When I first started using Vonage with my current equipment and ISP things were pretty good - a few drops here and there but nothing major. Lately it seems to have taken a turn for the worse. I've been on the phone with Vonage. The initial tech seemed to think it was related to my ISP - a wireless (non-satelite) broadband system. But, various test indicate that I don't have the kind of packet loss and latency that generally cause problems with satelite systems. Anyway, they are running my router in debug mode to gather info, but in the meantime I'm trying to track the problem down as well.

When I run testyourvoip I get interesting results. The connection from Boston to me is always fairly good (3.8 - 4.3 range) but the connection from me to Boston is generally problematic. The interesting part though, is that there is a big difference between the results that I get when testing inside vs. outside of the router. An example:

From behind the router me to Boston:
2.8 / 5.0
Round-Trip
Latency 372 ms
Packet Discards 2.1%
Packet Loss 2.4%
Loss Periods
Min: 20 ms
Avg: 40 ms
Max: 160 ms
Burst Loss
Jitter
Min: 0 ms
Avg: 15 ms
Max: 200 ms
Signaling Quality
Post-Dial Delay 160 ms
Call Setup Time 170 ms
Media Delay 360 ms

Outside the router, from me to Boston:
3.1 / 5.0
Round-Trip
Latency 365 ms
Packet Discards 2.8%
Packet Loss 1.3%
Loss Periods
Min: 20 ms
Avg: 40 ms
Max: 140 ms
Burst Loss
Jitter
Min: 0 ms
Avg: 14 ms
Max: 245 ms
Signaling Quality
Post-Dial Delay 150 ms
Call Setup Time 170 ms
Media Delay 245 ms

I have actually had test results with bigger differences, and generally the tests outside the router end up in the 3.1 - 3.5 range from me to Boston, but inside the router rarely exceed 3.1 - 3.2.

I average about 1.15MB down speed and about 128 - 180 KB up. The Linksys WRTP54G is running firmware 1.00.60. Using ping plotter tests it seems that I don't generally have a packet loss rate in excess of 1 - 2% on average and the latency numbers on average are not extreme as well.

My question is, could this be do to poor QoS algorithms in the router? The other though I had was changing the packet/frame size on the router. I have considered changing ISPs, but I'm trying to eliminate any hardware problems first, particularly because there are other people living in my neighborhood with the same ISP who have not had similar problems.

Any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 18, 2006 Posts: 4

I forgot to mention one aspect of the problem. The quality issues occur when we call other people. Incoming calls have consistently higher quality - including if we ask the other person to hang up and call us back. The difference is drastic.

Thank you again,
Jeremy

Posts: 4777 · Vonage Forum **MVM** Joined: Aug 30, 2005 Posts: 4777

Your packet discards and losses are pretty high. There is a difference in your results from behind the router and not, but they don't seem that extreme to me- they're high both ways. Overall your upload speed is pretty marginal. I'd try reducing the bandwidth setting and seeing if that helps things. I'd also be prepared for a discussion with my ISP about the packed losses.

Are you getting the speeds that you're paying for?

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 18, 2006 Posts: 4

I am getting the speeds that I'm paying for - the package claims to provide 1 MB down and about 128 KB up.

I've tried using the bandwidth saver mode, but that seemed to only cause the overall quality of the conversations to get worse - or so I'm told from the people on the other end.

I guess the packet loss is a bit high, but I keep getting caught up on the asynchronous nature of the problem. I mean I understand that my connection is asynchronous as well, but it seems strange to me that incoming calls are consistently better than the outgoing ones. Maybe I'm just missing something, but it seemed strange to me.

I've been preparing for a conversation with the ISP. My options are somewhat limited (I live in Mexico), but I have heard that people have had some sucess with the DSL option. I just want to eliminate all other possible problems before resorting to an ISP switch.

Jeremy