Callers Hear Random "Beeps"

With my Voipo service, callers on the other end of the line hear random beeps throughout a conversation that last a split second and occur on average a few times a minute. On my end, I do not hear beeps but rather short gaps in the caller's voice in place of when they are hearing the "beeps". I have tried different phones (both corded and cordless) and this issue persists. I have Comcast as my ISP and use the Voipo-provided Linksys RT31P2 as my ATA. Has anyone else experienced this problem or have any ideas what could be causing these beeps?

Its probably the well known "DTMF Talk-off" issue that Linksys adapters have. I do occasionally have this problem but not very often as you describe. It depends on the caller's voice tone. I am not sure if there is a good solution for this. At least, I have not heard of one.

I bet the fix for ATAs would mean gaps in the voice, and cause more complaints. I *think* out-of-band mode would prevent this, but may not always work.

I bet an IP Phone is immune, because it should know when the buttons are pressed.

As sr98user says, it's predominantly a Linksys ATA issue. Linksys has other ATA models that have adjustable "DTMF strict" settings to address this problem. Unfortunately, I don't believe the RT31P2 or PAP2T have the ability in their firmware to adjust this. You can contact support to have them set you to in-band DTMF. This should eliminate the issue but is likely to cause problems with some IVR systems especially Voipo's own voicemail system.

If it's too annoying, you might want to see if support can swap out your ATA with a Grandstream model.......

Thanks for the replies. I contacted Voipo tech support yesterday and they changed some DTMF setting in my ATA. Today, so far so good. No beeps when talking to my wife at home from my office phone.

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Originally Posted by usa2k

I bet the fix for ATAs would mean gaps in the voice, and cause more complaints. I *think* out-of-band mode would prevent this, but may not always work.

I bet an IP Phone is immune, because it should know when the buttons are pressed.

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Actually it's changing DTMF method to "INBAND" that fixed it for me. I had that problem on my PAP2. It drove me NUTZ. :) I kept blaming callers for pushing their TT buttons.

Correct...Changing DTMF method to "INBAND" fixed it for me as well. All is good now!

Does changing the DTMF method to "INBAND" cause problems with various IVR system?

On a different VoIP provider:
I had unreliable IVR successes with the Linksys ATAs. Had two. Some IVRs would work, others would not. The ATA seemed to distort the DTMF tones. Even the VoIP provider's voice mail had trouble, as did my drug store's prescription IVR and my employer's big-league voice mail.

Using the SIP signaling where the ATA detects DTMF tones and replaces tones with SIP messages (is that "OUT OF BAND"?) did not work for me. The VoIP provider (ViaTalk) actually blamed the Avaya PBX I was calling to for being at fault.

So far, no such issues with whatever default DTMF setting VoIPo has with the Grandstream.

But this was for me issuing DTMFs in accessing IVRs. Female voices can be mistaken for DTMFs by some crummy ATAs. That's a really lousy product, since the DTMF tone-pairs were carefully chosen long ago to preclude this.

"Out of band" sends the DTMF tones as separate RTP events and they are not part of the audio stream. Setting to INBAND doesn't work with many IVR systems. I wonder if Voipo does some kind of proxy'ing/conversion when setting it to INBAND for some users. By default Voipo sets it to "Auto" which means it will select the DTMF method depending on the initial negotiation.

I personally have problems with my Google Voice number that automatically starts recording the call (thinking that somebody pressed the "4" key) in the middle. Some say setting it to "INBAND" fixes the problem but for me that causes problems with IVR systems.