To Change or Not to Change Packetization?

Posts: 188 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Mar 07, 2004 Posts: 188

Recently I have heard that changing your packetization from 20 to 10 will help modem based equipment make their call outs. Does anyone know it this is true. If so, how will it effect my voice communications? I have a DirecTV Tivo and using a DSL Filter I have about a 50% success rate on completing my daily calls. I am trying to improve that and I am wondering if I should request that my packetization rate be changed. Thank you for any constructive input. Very Happy

Posts: 183 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: May 05, 2004 Posts: 183

I have no idea, but I'd give it a try if I was in your situation. See if it makes any diff. with voice or data calls and react accordingly (leave it at 10, put it back, throw up hands in disgust).

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: May 21, 2004 Posts: 2

strange_69 wrote:

Recently I have heard that changing your packetization from 20 to 10 will help modem based equipment make their call outs. Does anyone know it this is true. If so, how will it effect my voice communications? I have a DirecTV Tivo and using a DSL Filter I have about a 50% success rate on completing my daily calls. I am trying to improve that and I am wondering if I should request that my packetization rate be changed. Thank you for any constructive input. Very Happy

I just had mine changed to 10 in order to get my alarm to dial out and release the line when done. It was 0% successful before the change, and so far is 100% in my alarm testing.

I just asked my wife, who's been on the Vonage for a couple hours tonight, how the connection quality has been, and she said it actually sounded better than it did before. I trust her opinion as she uses the phone at least 2-3 hours straight every night.

For the DirecTivo, I just completed the HDVR2 serial to Win2k PPP to the internet solution and it hasn't missed a beat. This was extremely important to me as I wanted to stay on the $14.99 month Vonage plan, but with 2 DirecTivos the 500 minutes would (assuming) get eaten fast.

Posts: 110 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Mar 06, 2004 Posts: 110

By changing the packetization from 20 to 10 you are halving the seconds of speech in each packet that is sent over IP from 20 milliseconds (.020 seconds) to 10 ms. The size of the ethernet packets are also halved. However, the end-resulting ethernet stream rate is essentially unchanged, since twice as many packets must now be sent per second. (all this ignores headers, etc.)

This would certainly be expected increase apparent voice quality. But I am sure that there is a tradeoff (like increased packet loss, or increased sensitivity to packet loss). Not sure what that exact trade off might be. Anyone?

Posts: 183 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: May 05, 2004 Posts: 183

Thanks for the explanation, pylons!

Posts: 188 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Mar 07, 2004 Posts: 188

Thanks for the input everyone. Very Happy

I called Vonage Tech Support (got right through, by the way), and the Tech Dude that I talked to said that he was changing my packetization from "high" to "normal". He claimed that that would change it from 20 to 10. I really didn't see any change. When making daily calls, my DirecTivo usually makes it all the way to "Negotiating" before running into trouble. So now I am starting to wonder if the probably might not be on the DirecTV end. Radio Shack has a just plain (not DSL) phone filter that I think that I might try along with my DSL Phone Filter. If that does not work than that would be it. I can live with the way it works now, it's just that I was trying to make it better. Wink