Beeps, Tones, frustrated.....

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: May 31, 2005 Posts: 2

Hello all, I have been using Vonage for about 8 months. Have been getting the infamous beeping/tones when using Vonage recently. I have called tech support a few times. They have tried swithing me to port 2 (still don't understand that). Have also been pushed a updated firmware version (May 31 2005). I am wondering if others are still having this problem? I don't wanna redirected to the same old threads that discuss this issue. Is there a fix. I like the funtionality of Vonage. But these issue is getting old quick.

Any info would be appreciated...

JAZ

Posts: 646 · Posted: Tue May 31, 2005 5:14 pm Post subject:

I've had that happen a few times to me. I suspect that it occurs when someone's voice aligns to one of the DTMF tones, so the device transmits the pure tone, instead of the original audio.

It could just be something you have to live with, unless someone at Linksys figures out a better tone detection algorithm. If they make it too sensitive, you get stray beeps, but if it's not sensitive enough, it breaks menu systems.

Just a guess, but maybe this didn't show up in testing because it mostly happens with women's voices, and most engineers are men...

By the way, what's your firmware version? This might be the first report of something newer than 1.28.00.

Posts: 318 · Posted: Tue May 31, 2005 11:27 pm Post subject:

If you are hearing DTMF tones, this is a problem that, I understand, has been endemic to Voip technology.

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: May 31, 2005 Posts: 2

Firmware version is 1.28.00....

I really wish that when you talked to someone at Vonage they would just be upfront and honest with you. They seem to just want to issue a "quick fix" and call me in the morning answer. They started off strong, but are really slacking here lately. Still having the DTMF tones. They are just so anoying to the other person. My wife has to appologive to the other person every time she uses the phone....

P.S. Do any Vonage elployees look at this site. If so and you know whats really going on with this issue...

Thanks again....

jaz

Posts: 183 · Posted: Wed Jun 01, 2005 9:30 pm Post subject:

Vonage tried to convince me that the DTMF tones are caused by my cordless phone. I thought it might be possible, until I heard them on a call on my wired phone.

And yes, there are a number of Vonage insiders here, and they are enormously helpful.

Posts: 318 · Posted: Wed Jun 01, 2005 9:40 pm Post subject:

I don't think Vonage can do anything about the DTMF tones. You will be better off calling Linksys and demanding they release a new router with upgraded hardware. I don't believe firmware updates can fix it.

Posts: 646 · Posted: Wed Jun 01, 2005 11:09 pm Post subject:

It doesn't make sense that the tone detection would be done completely in hardware... if anything can fix it, it's new firmware. That said, determining the difference between a DTMF tone coming from a keypad, and a DTMF tone coming from someone's mouth, is not exactly an easy thing to do.

I suppose the underlying problem is that the TA is trying to interpret the DTMF tones itself, rather than sending the raw audio and letting a menu system on the other end handle the processing.

One question on my mind is, why does the TA need to interpret these tones in the first place? The most obvious answer I can think of is that the Voip codec distorts the tones too much to send them as raw audio. I could definitely see this happening when the bandwidth saver is enabled, but what about the full 90kbps rate? Even at the full rate, do the tones get distorted? Maybe they could disable the tone detection with the 90k codec.

Of course, the same questions probably went through the minds of the people designing this thing, so they must have some good reason, right?

Posts: 59 · Full Forum Member Joined: Dec 16, 2004 Posts: 59

otaku wrote:

If you are hearing DTMF tones, this is a problem that, I understand, has been endemic to Voip technology.

No it's not. I have an alternative Voip service and have never heard a tone. And I don't think my service provider is unique in that -- it seems to be a problem specific to Vonage and maybe a couple of other providers, may be more specifically the gear they use.

Here's my best guess of what is causing this -- when someone calls you the call is received by a Vonage gateway which converts from PSTN to IP. It also may be detecting DTMF tones, removing them from the audio trace, and passing them as events in the RTP packets (RFC 2833) that are sent to your ATA. If the dtmf detection provided by the gateway is faulty, a "false positive" can be triggered by a voice (typically a women's voice or background music) that has some quantity of the necessary dtmf frequencies. What might have sounded as a something unlike DTMF if heard in its original form, but containing enough of the relevant frequencies to be detected as DTMF, now gets transmitted to your ATA where it is recreated a s pure DTMF tone that you hear.

Therefore, I'd suggest that the blame lies with the PSTN gateways that Vonage is using.

Posts: 49 · Full Forum Member Joined: Jan 28, 2005 Posts: 49

This is called regenerative DTMF. It is often used in two-way radio communications where a repeater controller needs to pass DTMF or a telephone interconnect needs to pass DTMF to the telco.

sajer wrote:

Here's my best guess of what is causing this -- when someone calls you the call is received by a Vonage gateway which converts from PSTN to IP. It also may be detecting DTMF tones, removing them from the audio trace, and passing them as events in the RTP packets (RFC 2833) that are sent to your ATA. If the dtmf detection provided by the gateway is faulty, a "false positive" can be triggered by a voice (typically a women's voice or background music) that has some quantity of the necessary dtmf frequencies. What might have sounded as a something unlike DTMF if heard in its original form, but containing enough of the relevant frequencies to be detected as DTMF, now gets transmitted to your ATA where it is recreated a s pure DTMF tone that you hear.

Therefore, I'd suggest that the blame lies with the PSTN gateways that Vonage is using.

I have heard a single tone when I have latency on my Internet connection. This has happend only a handful of times over the past 7 months.

Posts: 10 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Apr 08, 2005 Posts: 10

I've been having this problem as well. DTMF tones randomly get inserted into the conversation. It's annoying as hell and if it keeps up I'll be switching back to my local telco.

I don't suppose anyone has any tips?