Sporadic Sound Loss -- my side calling others

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Jan 02, 2005 Posts: 3

Resut from the test:

Quote:

MOS Analysis from You TO London
? Media Quality

MOS 3.9 / 5.0 (Best with G.711 is 4.4)

Degradation Sources
Codec 0.58 53.5%
Latency 0.06 5.8%
Packet Discards 0.44 40.7%
Packet Loss 0.00 0.0%

Codec G.711 (PCM at 64kbps, 20ms RTP payload, 80kbps IP BW)
Round-Trip Latency 218 ms
Packet Discards 1.7%
Packet Loss 0.0%
Loss Periods
Min: 20 ms
Avg: 20 ms
Max: 40 ms
Random Loss

Jitter
Min: 0 ms
Avg: 2 ms
Max: 52 ms

Signaling Quality
Post-Dial Delay 162 ms
Call Setup Time 211 ms
Media Delay 482 ms

MOS Analysis FROM London To You
? Media Quality

MOS 3.8 / 5.0 (Best with G.711 is 4.4)

Degradation Sources
Codec 0.58 49.7%
Latency 0.06 5.5%
Packet Discards 0.52 44.7%
Packet Loss 0.00 0.0%

Codec G.711 (PCM at 64kbps, 20ms RTP payload, 80kbps IP BW)
Round-Trip Latency 218 ms
Packet Discards 2.0%
Packet Loss 0.0%
Loss Periods
Min: 20 ms
Avg: 20 ms
Max: 40 ms
Random Loss

Jitter
Min: 0 ms
Avg: 1 ms
Max: 42 ms

Signaling Quality
Post-Pickup Delay 294 ms
Call Setup Time 271 ms
Media Delay 326 ms

I make several test this is what I think the worst, but I don't know how to interpret this. Confused

Posts: 3198 · Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 9:09 pm Post subject:

considering you're in uh, what was it, argentina? those probably aren't too bad. not great, but for that type of international call, I would expect those kind of results. I just tested mine to london and I'm actually getting worse results in a few of them.

just to clarify as this thread has a lot of different things going on, is this your problem?
"Periodically, the people I'm talking to do not hear my side of the phone conversation, but I can always hear them. It's as if I have muted my phone. It resolves itself but usually lasts for about 15 seconds."

if so, my guess is packet loss and/or discards from latency. not sure what you can do to help that situation out. unless you can pinpoint it to a hardware issue, it's probably just the nature of the beast. the fact is, you're going to have high latency, discards and everything else when you have so far to go to your destinations. and correct me if I'm wrong, but even though a call may originate in a foreign country, the call always goes through a Vonage (US based) server. I don't believe they have a presence anywhere else, with the possible exceptions of canada and the UK.

Posts: 13 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jan 10, 2005 Posts: 13

Comcast told me that I needed to use a public ping tester like Yahoo. They stated that Pingplotter was not public. I'm totally lost

Posts: 34 · Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 10:15 pm Post subject:

perhaps a miscommunication? are you using pingplotter to ping www.pingplotter.com or www.yahoo.com?

Posts: 13 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jan 10, 2005 Posts: 13

I used Pingplotter and ran the test for 24 hours like Vonage asked me to, then I called Comcast to report the results of Pingplotter and Comcast told me that you can't use pingplotter (It's Pingless he stated) and that it is not a public tester. He told me that the Pingplotter test was an erroneos report.
He stated that I needed to use a public ping test like the one on Yahoo.

Posts: 4

I am having similar problems to Chrisp with Vonage and Comcast in the Boston area. I really want Vonage to work for me, but haven't gotten it to improve despite a few go-rounds with tech support. I have 10-20 second drop outs on a number of calls, but they seem to be two-way for me -- I can't hear them either.

Ironically I had absolutely no problems with the service for the 3 weeks before my former land line phone number got 'turned on' on Dec 21 2004. The problem started on the very day it got switched. I have a fairly fast connection but figured I should try the 'bandwidth saver' feature in case that was the problem. It only made things worse and the first tech guy I spoke with told me to turn it off. According to the tech there are latency problems because of the additional compression/decompression time! The techs have made various tweaks to the phone adapter since then, with little effect, except the last one which made things worse.

I too ran ping plotter, against yahoo.com. Since I am on the East coast (Boston) I was getting high latency on the jump from NY to CA. It was about 125ms to NY and about twice that to Yahoo, via level3.net. I did have occasional packet losses, but they never coincided with any call problems. I'm sure they don't want everyone pinging the Vonage servers themselves, but I can't help thinking pinging Yahoo is somewhat irrelevant. My calls should be at least going through an east coast server somewhere when I am making local calls, or am I totally ignorant?

Now that I'm done venting, the help I can offer is eliminating your home network & router as an issue. Assuming you have a separate cable modem (not integrated w/ router) you should be able to just unplug your router from the cable modem and plug the phone adapter in directly. I did this last night but unfortunately with no improvement. I am now looking for the problem in the cable modem, phone adapter or maybe just comcast's network.

I'll post any solutions I find, but I may have to go back to (ugh) Verizon soon if I can't get this resolved.[/b]

Posts: 13 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jan 10, 2005 Posts: 13

The biggest problem is not getting a straight answer from both Comcast and Vonage. It seems you can speak to 5 different people from Comcast and 5 different people from Vonage and get 10 different opinions and diferent instructions. Customer service with Vonage is horrible, with the average wait time approx 50 min when calling in prime time.

Posts: 8 · New Forum Member Joined: May 27, 2004 Posts: 8

I've had Comcast come out 2x's this week, and I had to pick up a new cable modem as well. I'm still getting slow/long latency. Pingplotter is showing 300-600ms in traces. Comcast CSR's advised me to delete my cookie, clear my cache, and to defrag my hard disk. Interesting answers, but not at all relevant to my issue.

Today I spoke to a Comcast CSR Supervisor, asking what the status of my open trouble ticket is. Seems she can't tell. Yesterday's tech has not yet updated the notes, and the local dispatch office is not answering their internal phone calls. In short I too am hosed.

Vonage is trying to help out, but they are not my "agent" So I have to deal with Comcast directly.

What I need to do, I belive, is to talk to a network engineer. Any ideas how to go about this?