Vonage over Google Wifi

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: May 29, 2009 Posts: 2

I moved to Mountain View, CA where free GoogleWifi service is available. I bought Ruckus MM2211 wifi modem for getting reliable connection to city wide wifi. Internet browsing etc are all fine. But Vonage voice quality is terrible. My connection order is like this
1) Ruckus MM2211
2) Netgear WGT624 V3
3) Linksys PAP2 V2 Vonage adapter

Speed test statistics vary widely every time i run it. Here is a sample

Speed test statistics
---------------------
Download speed: 567672 bps
Upload speed: 496928 bps
Quality of service: 13 %
Download test type: socket
Upload test type: socket
Maximum download pause: 699 ms
Average download pause: 21 ms
Minimum round trip time to server: 238 ms
Average round trip time to server: 875 ms

Voip test statistics
--------------------
Jitter: you --> server: 12.9 ms
Jitter: server --> you: off
Packet loss: you --> server: 0.4 %
Packet loss: server --> you: off
Packet discards: 0.0 %
Packets out of order: 0.0 %
Number of supported Voip lines: 8
Estimated MOS score: 3.6

Any suggestions on improving voice quality will be greatly appreciated.

Posts: 656 · Posted: Thu May 28, 2009 10:33 pm Post subject:

Honestly these test results are very bad. You have to realize that browsing the web and other such applications like e-mail use the TCP protocol which retransmits packets that are not received due to the way TCP acknowledges. Vonage and Voip services use the UDP protocol as it is a streaming media where packet retransmissions are not possible. Any packet loss on a UDP stream and your stream is incomplete. Incomplete data stream means incomplete Voice.

Your QOS is measuring 13%. Anything under 85% and your not looking at a reliabe Voip connection.

Your Maximum download pause and your round trip times indicate very high latency which is the contributing factor to the jitter present. Packets work in a sequence order.1,2,3,4,5 etc... I don't even understand how the Voip test only shows 12.9ms jitter and a MOS score of 3.6. This does not seem accurate.

If packet 1 gets from point A to point B in 50ms and so does packet 3 but packet 2 takes 400ms to get there, the jitter buffers have to compensate for these delayed and out of order packets so that the Voice will flow. If there is too much jitter because there are many missing packets or packets are too delayed, your audio will sound extremely choppy.

Are you able to stream music from the internet and you tube videos over your connection without constant buffering? If you are unable to stream basic media files your not going to be able to use Vonage.

This is not a simple fix of just making changes to your network or getting a different Vonage device. However, in your case, you could try upgrade to a Vonage V-Portal as it does have much more robust jitter buffers and can be placed between your modem and Netgear router which will provide additional QOS which can't be done with your current PAP2. Just keep in mind that while this could give a slight improvement, nothing we can instruct you on will fix your internet connection itself. I also assume that your wifi service operates on line of sight so you may want to confirm that your antenna is properly positioned to obtain the best possible signal.

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: May 29, 2009 Posts: 2

Thanks for your quick reply. I tried positioning the Wifi Modem at different location of our house. The wifi connectivity strength on Ruckus modem is full five bars, which according to Google is very good.
Surprisingly youtube performance is not too bad. It buffered once over a 3 min video. Maybe i should try V-portal with integrated switch to see if it is any better.

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: Aug 20, 2009 Posts: 1

aarthi wrote:

Thanks for your quick reply. I tried positioning the Wifi Modem at different location of our house. The wifi connectivity strength on Ruckus modem is full five bars, which according to Google is very good.
Surprisingly youtube performance is not too bad. It buffered once over a 3 min video. Maybe i should try V-portal with integrated switch to see if it is any better.

See my query to google wifi here --- http://groups.google.com/group/Google-WiFi-Network/browse_thread/thread/162f48e65a53ad32/3fd5f3b17c9ad86e#3fd5f3b17c9ad86e