Obi and GV calls blank out after a while

[sjmyst]

Ok, my wife had her first long call using the wifi extender config I set up first after the factory reset and reconfig on ObiTalk.

She reports that there were 8 or 9 events of between 3 to 8 seconds where she couldn't hear the other side.  She says the caller didn't say anything about not being able to hear what she was saying.

I asked her to compare this to before and she says that even with this many "voice blanks out" events, that this is still much improved from last week.

This is enough for me to move on to the next configuration.

So, configuring the ObiWifi on the Obi202 to use the USB Wifi plugin.  Then, give this a week or so (or until it shows similar "bad" behavior).

Regards,
sjmyst

[sjmyst]

With the ObiWifi, the results were very similar to using a CAT5 Ethernet out of the "Internet" port on the back of the Obi202 into my Netgear Wifi extender.

After a couple of hours of calls, my wife was reporting a dozen or so blanking out events between 3 to 15 seconds.

I have now moved on to remove Wifi from the equation.  I've run a long phone line cable across the room.  So, I'm using CAT5 from the "Internet" port directly to a port on the back of my router.  And, the long phone line comes out of the LINE1 port and goes across the room to connect into the phone line system the house is wired with.

This has been the most stable configuration yet.  My wife reports maybe 1 time over a few hours of calls where there might have been a second of blanking.  I've only seen 1 dropped packet.  Underruns are 108 packets out of 250k packets.  0 Overrun packets.

So, it appears my router Wifi isn't consistent enough.  I will let the run for a while longer to make sure the consistency continues.

If this is the final configuration, I will need to figure out how to either get CAT5 over to my phone.  Or, how to get a phone cable from the phone over to behind my TV.  

I have one other configuration I can try via Wifi.  And, that is to try my router 5G Wifi network.  And, possibly to research if my Netgear Nighthawk has any router options to improve Wifi consistency.

But, it seems I may have to figure out how to run a cable.

I would still like to figure out if GV can provide Caller Name from my GV Contacts list.  Sounds like it it still broken and may stay that way for a while (it appears to be a low priority issue).

Regards,
sjmyst

[sjmyst]

Ok, been running my Obi202 with CAT5 for Internet connectivity and MUCH fewer blanking issues.  All week I had 2 reported incidents of voice "blanking" and both were brief in length of time (less than 2 seconds).  On the down side, I found my wife using her cell phone at her desk where she usually uses the landline.  So, not sure she used the phone as much as past weeks.

Great!  Right?  Well, this week, I also had 2 incidents where calls were not working either in or out of my home number (this Obi202).  The first time a reboot fixed the issue.  The second time I was writing up a ticket to submit to Obihai support, and the problem cleared up on it's own.

The 2nd incident seems like it might have been a GV issue.  But, the 1st one seemed like a problem with my device since the reboot fixed it.

I also had one other incident where my wife says she called someone and the voice quality was horrible.  It was so choppy from both ends that she couldn't communicate at all and just hung up.  She rebooted the Obi202 and things were all better after that.

So, I've created a script to reboot my Obi202 each morning at 4:30am.  I'm hoping that might help to resolve any issues where I find out later that things haven't been working all day and a reboot fixes the problem.

From a statistics point of view, I am seeing very few packet drops.  There have been a couple.  But, they happen like at most 1 per call.  And, have seen less than 5 or so for the week.  However, I do see packet underruns.  The numbers are a lot higher for them.  And, when one of the "blanking" events was reported, the only number that increased was underruns.

I very nice feature would be to keep the "Call Status" final stats for each call.  I wouldn't think it would be hard to modify the "Call History" to show those stats if the final stats snapshot were kept for each call.  This would help to debug what things went wrong when a problem occurs.  My wife can usually tell me who she was talking to when "things went wrong".

Regards,
sjmyst

[seanfl]

In case it helps anyone, I was working with a business that used voip phones. They had the exact same issue, audio would drop out, often near the 30 second mark.

It ended up being a router issue. Once we changed out the router to something else the problem went away. There was something that was happening to the NAT routing with VOIP calls that caused them to lose audio.

Consider taking your phone to another location with different router and internet feed and seeing if it does the same thing.

[sjmyst]

Thank you seanfl for the suggestions.  But, I've had this problem for years with different network providers using at least a half dozen different routers.

I finally figured out that my problem was because my wifi wasn't stable enough.  Possibly I have too many other wireless devices in my house, or at nearby neighbor's houses?  Dunno.  But, once I directly connected my Obi202 to my router, the blanking problem has pretty much disappeared.

I now have other problems like occasionally when I (or more often my wife) picks up the phone the phone just blasts static.  Or, at the end of a call this same thing happens.  I feel like I've run into that before and changed something in the Obi202 settings to "fix" that.  I'm still running with the default settings and I wanted to give this configuration a long trial (we were out of town for several weeks and weren't using it for a while).

But, the "blanking" part seems to have been fixed by bypassing Wifi and going to an Ethernet cable.  I ended up having to run a phone line to where my router exists.  It was a pain in the ass and I lose some coax functionality because I had to pull the phone line up using the coax.  But, I might be able to pull the coax back down again.  I just know it will be a pain because the hole will be very tight getting both the coax and the phone cable down the same hole.  But, that's another problem not related to my Obi202...

Anyway, I've left my Yate server off for now.  I don't like not have CNAM.  And, I was not able to get Google to work by using my Address book.  I may go back to my Yate server.  But, I may not because Microsoft would occasionally "break" the phone by installing patches and rebooting.  And, the Yate server wouldn't always come up clean (even though I configured it to come up on reboot).

Hopefully this will help someone else who might run into this same issue.

Thanks to everyone who provided suggestions.

Regards,
sjmyst