Troubleshooting occasional poor outgoing call quality

[protomok]

Hi,

I've had a couple people mention that they can't hear me, the audio is crackly, poor quality etc.

It seems that the poor call quality does not happen every time, and it only seems to affect outgoing voice...I can hear everyone just fine.

At the moment my current debugging approach is try to get everyone to tell me before they make a call, or if they receive a call so I can manually record. But since there appears to be no way to automatically record calls (e.g. to a CIFS or NFS share) I need to manually set up the recording each time, and have been unable to reproduce a recording showing the poor quality.

Any ideas on how else I can debug this issue? Have others come across this problem? I have an Obi110 w/ Software version 1.3.0 (Build: 2744).

Thanks,
Mark

[Lavarock7]

Who is the provider?

In the case of Google, you can go into GoogleVoices call history and mark the call quality. There have been cases where calls to specific cities or area codes have been bad for a while, regardless of the carrier.

My cellphone company had a process to report bad cell tower connection (bad audio, noisy audio, etc)

[AlanB]

Do you have an online backup system running?  If so, you might try limiting it to hours you don't make calls and see if that helps.

[protomok]

Hey,

The provider is voip.ms. We had another case where we can hear the other person on the line fine but they can't hear us very well, crackly voice, poor quality, etc. but I didn't get a recording of the call. Even if I am able to record the call and see packets dropping or whatever I'm not sure what I will even be able to do.

I'll follow up with voip.ms.

@AlanB - we don't have any automated network backups running at the moment. But now that I think about I might have had an active torrent download when the issue happened yesterday. I'll try a test where I start a call then start a torrent download and see if that triggers the problem when the download speed increases. Unfortunately my router doesn't support QOS

Can anyone recommend a good home router w/QOS?

Thanks

[Shale]

Your problem is probably more with uploads rather than downloads. You may be uploading P2P even though may not have known. Prove the concept by pulling the ethernet cable from your computer to the router during a problem phone call.

Some home routers can accept firmware that will do good QOS upstream. Search for your router along with DD-WRT or Tomato.