Outbound call quality issues - dropping audio and jittery

[Mike_TV]

How do I start troubleshooting outbound call quality issues? I have people telling me that "I'm breaking up" or they don't hear a syllable or two. Sometimes entire words are dropped and the calling party will say "Can you repeat that".

From my end, people I call sound fine and the audio of the other party isn't an issue.

My ATA is in the DMZ with a fixed IP address. My cable ISP is connected to my home gigabit LAN and I get 100 megabit down and 20 megabits up service.

Where do I start trying to troubleshoot these audio problems?

[christcorp]

How do I start troubleshooting outbound call quality issues? I have people telling me that "I'm breaking up" or they don't hear a syllable or two. Sometimes entire words are dropped and the calling party will say "Can you repeat that". From my end, people I call sound fine and the audio of the other party isn't an issue. My ATA is in the DMZ with a fixed IP address. My cable ISP is connected to my home gigabit LAN and I get 100 megabit down and 20 megabits up service. Where do I start trying to troubleshoot these audio problems?

You've got plenty of bandwidth. Take the ATA OUT of the DMZ. Keep it with a static IP address, and set up QOS and dedicate bandwidth to the ATA. If you need to do some indepth troubleshooting, start from the beginning. Make the ATA dynamic IP automatically; and plug it in directly to the cable modem. No computers, no router, etc. Just the cable modem and the ATA. If you still have jitter type issues, then it's probably your ISP. There's a lot more to internet service than how much bandwidth they give you. Cable; unlike DSL; is more of a "SHARED" pipe. Whereby DSL is dedicated to you until it hits the dslam. I have cable, and I notice that late afternoon when kids are out of school and adults are home from work, the internet definitely starts to lag. Even though bandwidth tests show good high bandwidth speeds. There's a lot more to your connection than just bandwidth. If you still have problems with just the cable modem and ATA, then it's your ISP and there's not much you can do about that. If it clears up, then you can start troubleshooting your network to see if you have devices on the network that is choking your connection. You don't however mention if the chopping audio is just sometimes, most of the time, or all of the time. You might need to experiment to see if the choppy calls are generally at a certain time of day. Again; possibly the ISP over subscribing their network. This is the problem with voip. With all of the people who fight for "NET NEUTRALITY" and believe that the internet needs to be open with ISP's not prioritizing any traffic, there is a downside. Surfing, email, downloads, etc. don't really care about jitter, latency, etc. But LIVE activities that CAN'T RESEND packets; such as VOIP, Video Conferencing, gaming, etc. are directly affected when the traffic can't be prioritized or at least tunneled based on the type. Try experimenting and some of the suggestions. You might be able to determine WHERE the issue is. Once you know where it is, it will be easier to fix it. Or at least work around it. Mike.