anyone using vonage overseas (Germany, Australia, England)

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: Nov 21, 2003 Posts: 2

I am curious to hear any feedback from anyone using Vonage while they are out of the country. If anyone has any experience with this please let me know. I am concerned about latency, packet loss, and quality over these distances to get the call back to the United States.

Guest

I am interested in trying the service myself in the Philippines, I will sending my adapter to a friend there for testing. So it would be interesting to hear the experience of others.

Guest

I am interested in having a N.Y.C. area virtual # that I can use while I live in Lima, Peru. I would also be interested in current customer expierience.

Guest

I'm using Vonage in Poland with no problems at my current connection. But I have had problems at other locations. It seems that ISPs in a lot of European countries don't really focus on the quality of connection, only on speed. I've seen internet connections reach 1mb/sec but with packet loss like you wouldn't believe.

There are really three things that affect Vonage. One is speed, should be at least 128Kb/sec, second is packet loss, shouldn't be more than 4-5% accross hops (this causes dropped sound) and latency (shouldn't be more than 150ms between hops, this causes dropped calls and delay).

A quick and easy way to check if Vonage will work in any country, or connection, is to download and run ping plotter software and check the results. This will give you an idea if the quality of the internet connection is good enough to support Vonage.

Here are the instructions from Vonage:
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Download and install application using this link:

http://www.pingplotter.com/download.html

Download the shareware via HTTP. This is a 30 day trial

Once the application is up and running, follow these steps to set the
PingPlotter up to run a thorough test:

1- Right click on where it says "DNSname", in the top center of the
screen. One by one, place a check mark by all the different options on
the top of this menu. This will tell the test to give you all the
detailed data during the test.

2- On the lower left hand side of the screen, ensure these are the
settings: "# of times to trace" = Unlimited (should be this way by
default), "trace interval" = 2.5 seconds (click the down arrow),
and "samples to include" = ALL (click the down arrow).

3- On the top left hand side of the screen, click on "Edit",
the "Advanced Options", then "Packet Options". The forth option down
says "Packet Size in Bytes, default 56"; change this to 1400, then
hit “OK”. The MTU (Maximum Transmission Size) of the data in an
Ethernet packet is 1518 bytes. Some routers across the Internet may
restrict packets of this size, so if the results look very, very poor,
you can try to set the packet size to 1200 bytes.

4- Now that the application is set up to begin the test, we need to
enter the appropriate IP address or domain name to trace to at the top
left hand of the screen.
If you are east of the Mississippi trace to this IP address
63.123.233.30 (except NJ then use 63.236.4.243)
If you are west of the Mississippi, trace to this IP address
63.236.4.243 (except CA then use 63.123.233.30)

5- Now hit the big "Trace" button on the lower left hand side of the
screen and let the test the run for about two minutes. Your test should
look something like this: http://pingplotter.com/nessoftgraph.gif

6- You can leave the test running. Now that we have the results, we
have to see if there is a problem across this route. The first hop is
your location; the last hop is where you are testing to. We are mainly
concerned with two columns on this test. The third column, which is the
PL% (packet loss percentage), and the sixth column, Ave (Average
Latency at that hop, measured in milliseconds). Since the Vonage
service is a "real-time" streaming audio service, any packet loss is a
bad thing, as this will cause choppy audio. As far as latency, we worry
about our service when the average latency reaches around 150ms or
higher across the hops. If either of these results is excessive, this
may cause a call to drop, or the link from your ATA to our servers to
break.

Posts: 14 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Oct 29, 2003 Posts: 14

Thanks for the great instructions!

Posts: 14 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Oct 29, 2003 Posts: 14

Any ideas why I would have 25% PL on my first hop and then between 92% and 60% all the rest of the way -- never lower than 60%? Seems off the chart bad compared to what you suggest. But my service isn't terrible. Not great, but not unusable. Any thoughts?

Guest

Joelb,
This is usually the case when your router (or your ISPs) is set up to transfer packet sizes that are too small. The larger packet sizes required by Vonage, 1200-1400, are not getting through. Check your router, or ask your ISP. Send them a screenshot of your ping plotter results and see if they can fix the issue.

Posts: 14 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Oct 29, 2003 Posts: 14

Robbo123,

Thanks very much for the advice. I'm fairly familiar with the set-up of my Linksys router and could not find anywhere that allow me to set any parameters for packet size. I've emailed my ISP (Adelphia Powerlink), but it seems hard to imagine that they could change such a setting just for my account or that my request would get them to change a setting that affects the entire neighborhood. Do you -- or anyone else -- have some experience with ISPs in this regard?

Also, do you mind if I post this conversation to the Voip newsgroup as I'm sure others would find it helpful?

Thanks again.

Posts: 37 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Dec 02, 2003 Posts: 37

I have tried it from Taiwan and it worked well. The worst thing is people calling me in the middle of the night not knowing I was in Asia.

Guest

The latency on my (Optus) cable connection seems to be 200ms-250ms and is steady. The utility on the Vonage site indicates the kbps are acceptable. Have not yet run pingplotter but will do so

Anyone had any practical experience from Oz ?

thanks

SGM