Switch from Time Warner to RCN and now Vonage quality is bad

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: May 27, 2005 Posts: 3

I was a happy customer using Vonage on Time Warner Cable (Roadrunner). About3 weeks ago I switched to RCN. MY upload/dowload speeds are actually faster with RCN.

I was using the Motorola phone adapter.

So I called Vonage and they tested my speeds and they said everything looked good. They recommended switching to the Linksys router. I received the Linksys router this morning, pluged it in and.....

Same. It still sounds terrible. Line goes dead for 3-5 seconds. The person using Vonage sounds high pictched. And I hear static.

Is anyone else experiencing problems with RCN and Vonage? Given the choice between the two, I will keep RCN and switch back to Verizon.

Anyone have ANY suggestions?

Posts: 318 · Posted: Fri May 27, 2005 10:14 am Post subject:

Either RCN's network **** and drops lots of packets, or they are, ahem, not prioritizing VoIP traffic very high. At least not Vonage VoIP traffic.

The only two ways to fix this would be to: a) call up RCN and tell them your VoIP service isn't working; demand they come out and test it (this will probably cost you money) or b) switch back to Time Warner.

Posts: 51 · Posted: Fri May 27, 2005 10:20 am Post subject:

Bandwidth is only part of the story and almost everyone has enough bandwidth. Jitter, latency and packet drop are the real killers and could account for all of your symptoms. Run testyourvoip.com and post your results. That site also has very useful information to help you interpret the results.

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: May 27, 2005 Posts: 3

I spoke to Vonage and they provided me with abunch of tests to run. Ill run the tests and post the results here.

Thanks for the replies

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: May 27, 2005 Posts: 3

Well an update....

I ran the tests Vonage asked me to run and they CONFIRMED that I am experiencing over 20% packet loss. I called RCN and they also CONFIRMED that I am receiving 20% packet loss on the upload side of my connection.

RCN is on their way out now to diagnose the problem. The question I have (and I know noone can really answer this), is why this started happenining all of a sudden.

Posts: 12 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Oct 17, 2005 Posts: 12

Thanks for testyourvoip.com

My results are 2.0/5.0 from montreal to san diego and
4.5/5.0 from san diego to montreal

I live in San Diego and that's exactly the problem I'm having: keeps breaking up when listening to people I talk to.
I've done testing all day and found out that most of the time, my upload speed is below the Vonage requirement of 90 kbps. Most times I'm around 70 kbps.

And that's not all...

I've done traceroutes and while most hops are usually well within 100 ms, there is a switch at AT&T NYC that's giving me the following results:

13 2941 ms * 85 ms tbr1-cl14.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.122.10.1]

If you guys want to test it to, just go to RUN and type CMD
then type:
tracert 12.144.47.129 (that's the vonage server IP address)

Don't do it just once, keep doing it until eventually you see the big numbers appear. and then clip and paste it in here so we can all share the information together.

ms stands for milliseconds 1 thousand's of a second.
This represents the amount of time it takes a specific packet to go from server to server. If you see anything larger than say 500 ms, that's not normal.

Please report that switch to vonage and your internet carrier.
Time Warner gives me the run around and tells me there's nothing they can do about it....

Strangely all of this started happening when after they wanted to sell me their VoIP phone service and I told them I was with Vonage already, soon thereafter I was starting to have the problem.

Coincidence? Who knows... but I know I had been using Vonage for over 2 years before and it was always as clear as a bell.

Pete, StepNjump

Posts: 12 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Oct 17, 2005 Posts: 12

Please note the 78% packet loss!!!! Oh my!

MOS
2.0 / 5.0
(Best with G.711 is 4.4)

Degradation Sources
Codec 0.57 19.1%
Latency 0.09 2.9%
Packet Discards 0.00 0.0%
Packet Loss 2.35 78.0%
Codec G.711 (PCM at 64kbps,
20ms RTP payload,
80kbps IP BW)
Round-Trip
Latency 257 ms
Packet Discards 0.0%
Packet Loss 10.8%
Loss Periods
Min: 20 ms
Avg: 100 ms
Max: 260 ms
Burst Loss
Jitter
Min: 4 ms
Avg: 7 ms
Max: 280 ms
Signaling Quality
Post-Pickup Delay 960 ms
Call Setup Time 972 ms
Media Delay 991 ms