Question on what kind of call clarity is to be expected?

Posts: 281

Hi,
The other day some of you may remember me posting about some priority settings on a bandwidth shaper and also on the linksys gear Vonage is now shipping. Well after some tweaking in our network operation center, calls are now fairly clear... but I have some questions for people who have used vonage...

To the more tech savvy who might be involved in an ISP:
Do you have any experience using Vonage over Alvarion 2.4 or VL Terrestrial Fixed Wireless links? If so, how well does it work? What is your subscription rate/AU. Are you doing any special bandwidth/framerate shaping?

To the regular user:
What kind of call clarity do you get from Vonage VoIP... not what do you expect.. but what do you get? In other words, I had a 30 minute conversation with my dad yesterday, and it probably had a slight blip here and there, but towards the end he started to break up really bad for about a minute.. then things got fine again.
Do you all experience these types of anomolies? Or are your calls prettymuch POTS+ quality? (mine are when not breaking up)

I work for an ISP and we currently have 2 customers (myself as one) using Vonage over Fixed Terrestrial Wireless and are having a slight issue (or maybe not depending on what other people think about the dropouts in sound), with sound blips and sometimes really bad audio for about a minute at a time. (Which I'm thinking is when the AU is getting temporarily higher usage.. before a traffic shaper can kick in fully? But that's for other's who might be using this Alvarion gear to answer...)

Posts: 49 · Full Forum Member Joined: Nov 27, 2004 Posts: 49

I'm in Boston and the Verizon infrastructure is rather poor, so my old landline phone had a fair amount of static.

My Vonage service has been considerably clearer... matter of fact, all static is gone. I've been having rather long conversations on Vonage and haven't experienced any blips, latency or anything else that would make me think I was using Voip.

The clarity is remarkable, even when I'm doing bandwidth-hogging downloads. My ISP is Comcast Cable and I have my Linksys RT31P2 between my cable modem and my Airport Express router.

Posts: 65 · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2004 8:43 am Post subject: Call or Voice Quality

I guess you'd call me a regular user. We've had service with Vonage for about 6 weeks and my wife uses it regularly to call friends and family in New England. We're located in Peoria, Illinois. The call quality is generally superb. No background noise issues, so soft voice issues, no latency issues (if there is latency, it is not noticeable), no dropouts, no nothing (that almost sounds like a complaint, but it's not).

My IP is Insight cable, I use the RT31PT between my modem (SB100) and my regular Linksys 4 port wired router. I don't normally do heavy computing while on the phone and maybe that helps.

Bottom line, we're really happy with the service. My only complaint is lack of a local area code/phone number.

Posts: 281 · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2004 8:46 am Post subject:

Yeah no local number seems to be alot of people's complaint... Vonage just got a local area code to me 570 (though I'm in Williamsport, PA ugh.. oh well Scranton is close enough for now).

Hey.. when you live in Peoria... what do you expect.. nothing but cows right Wink

Ok.. thanks guys for your insight... we've gotten the Voip that I use working much better through some TOS tagging over the wireless network.. calls are now very clear.

Posts: 65 · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2004 4:10 pm Post subject: Call or Voice Quality

Matth:

When I first came out here, I didn't know what to expect. I'm originally from New England (Connecticut) and while I heard of Peoria, I did expect to see cows walking down Main Street. The truth of the matter is there are few cows, it is corn on the left and soybeans on the right, repeated again ad infinitum. The town is great and the people are fine and that makes it all worthwhile.

Glad you got your clarity issues fixed.

Happy Holidays.

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: Jan 11, 2005 Posts: 1

I've had Vonage for about 3 months now. FOr the most part the calls have been good. However what I get is if I talk about 30 to 45 mins the person on the other end can't hear me. I don't know if it clears up or not because they have always hung up after about 30 secs. It happens almost every time.

The other irritating thing is the constant "hissing" noise. I have the Linksys rt31p2 router and from my research this device has that problem. Vonage is supposed to be sending me a new one I'll let you know if it fixes the problem. But just for those who want to know this is what I've done to isolate the problem. I've tried the adapter on 3 ISPs (Bellsouth, Comcast, and a T1 line) all performed about the same. The static level didn't change at all. I have used it connected directly to the modems (DSL, Cable) no change. Wireless system in use or not - no change. I did notice that using a cordless phone on 900 mhz was the same, but of course using a cordless phone on 2.4 just added more static - but that's a different issue. My brother has the Motorola adapter and on a side by side comparison his was much clearer.

So here it is: If they send you a linksys rt31p2 expect to hear the constant sound of the ocean in your ear. If you don't have any other noise around and a good corded phone it's bearable. If you have any notion of using a cheap telephone, cordless, or expect clarity don't let them send you a rt31p2 adapter. If when I get my replacement rt31p2 in and they have fixed the problem - i'll be sure to leave a new post

Posts: 646 · Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 11:17 pm Post subject:

If you want to hear the maximum quality that Vonage could possibly have, then open something in Sound Recorder, go to Properties, and hit Convert Now. Then choose the following, because it's the same encoding used by Vonage at 90kbps:

CCITT u-Law
8.000kHz, 8-bit, Mono

This isn't terribly useful, but it could be interesting to play with.

Posts: 70 · Full Forum Member Joined: Jan 11, 2005 Posts: 70

beninatl wrote:

I've had Vonage for about 3 months now. FOr the most part the calls have been good. However what I get is if I talk about 30 to 45 mins the person on the other end can't hear me. I don't know if it clears up or not because they have always hung up after about 30 secs. It happens almost every time.

The other irritating thing is the constant "hissing" noise. I have the Linksys rt31p2 router and from my research this device has that problem. Vonage is supposed to be sending me a new one I'll let you know if it fixes the problem. But just for those who want to know this is what I've done to isolate the problem. I've tried the adapter on 3 ISPs (Bellsouth, Comcast, and a T1 line) all performed about the same. The static level didn't change at all. I have used it connected directly to the modems (DSL, Cable) no change. Wireless system in use or not - no change. I did notice that using a cordless phone on 900 mhz was the same, but of course using a cordless phone on 2.4 just added more static - but that's a different issue. My brother has the Motorola adapter and on a side by side comparison his was much clearer.

So here it is: If they send you a linksys rt31p2 expect to hear the constant sound of the ocean in your ear. If you don't have any other noise around and a good corded phone it's bearable. If you have any notion of using a cheap telephone, cordless, or expect clarity don't let them send you a rt31p2 adapter. If when I get my replacement rt31p2 in and they have fixed the problem - i'll be sure to leave a new post

Which adapter do you recommend then??

Posts: 66 · Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2005 7:05 am Post subject:

Have you tried the seemingly succesful work around of connecting a regular phone to to telephone port #2 on your Linksys adapter and leaving the phone off-hook? This worked well for me and several others on this site and Broadband Reports to rid (or at least reduce to a tolerable level) of the high frequncy "noise".