Brandon Fuller

Vonage Voice Quality Issues

As reported, I switched our home phone to Vonage a while back. I don’t use the home phone myself a lot. Lately the technical support cases that my wife opens to me are increasing. I may have to hire a support help desk to wave their hands to keep her at bay.

The quality of your Vonage phone call depends on your available bandwidth — and we have a bunch of bandwidth. With everything we do here, I have a 1.5 mb/s fixed wireless connection, which is pretty damn fast all the time. I have also been having voice quality issues with my work phone, which of course is also a VoIP phone.

The last time I called Vonage, I got some dork that ran me through a bunch of lame steps including changing my voice quality level to medium instead of high. This was a negligible amount of bandwidth savings compared to the total capacity of my connection, but OK I will try it. Didn’t help.

So the pain in this is that you get into this finger pointing between Vonage and your ISP. Every time my ISP had me run tests they would all pass but those were only testing in a 1 minute burst. However, I got a hold of someone at Vonage that knew something and we went through and tested a bunch of things and then he had me run this shareware tool called PingPlotter. You probably know what pings are but this tool runs them as long as you want and draws pretty graphs to show the problems.

Once the application is up and running, follow these steps to set the Ping Plotter up to run a thorough test.

1. On the lower left hand side of the screen, enter the following settings: “# of times to trace” = Unlimited; “Trace Interval” = 2.5 seconds; “Samples to Include” = 10

2. From the “Edit” menu, select Options. On the window that opens select “Packet Options”. Change the “Packet Size” to 1200.

3. Now that the application is set up to begin the test, enter: www.yahoo.com as the “Address to trace” and click on the “Trace” button on the lower left hand side of the screen.

4. Let the test run for 1 hour then click “Stop”.

We are mainly concerned with two columns on this test, the PL% (Packet Loss Percentage) and Ave (Average Latency) columns. You can send the output file to Vonage and they will diagnose if you cannot. To do this, click on “File” on the top left hand side of the screen, the on “Save Sample Set…”.

I then went back to my ISP with this data. I got a hold of one of the primary network engineers. He correlated it with an issue that they “just discovered” at the 2nd hop in their network. They are working on it right now and hopefully things will get better.

So remember, you not only need some good size pipes for VoIP…you need some reliable ones.