I am currently using an Obi200 with both google voice and freephoneline as service providers. Those receiving calls from me regularly complain about my voice breaking up or becoming choppy but my issue is that I have several potential culprits at fault here, with evidence supporting each. I was hoping that someone with a bit more technical knowledge would be able to help me tease out the exact cause of the issue. I figure there are three potential sources for my issue and I have found that there is evidence supporting each...I'm mentioning them in no particular order.
(1) Upstream bandwidth saturation.
I find that the issue tends to occur more in the evening, during peak hours for cable service. When I make phone calls in the morning or afternoon, I rarely get complaints. My internet plan is on cable 15/1. I've been told that 1 mbps is more than sufficient for VOIP, and I've seen the numbers, but based on the fact the issue seems to be worse in the evening I wonder if it is not part of the issue. I have QOS set up on my router but it really should not be a QOS issue since no one else is using the internet when I get these complaints.
(2) Poor service from freephoneline.
The complaints seem to occur disproportionately when I am receiving or making calls through freephoneline. If I call back through Google Voice, the recipient still has to ask me to repeat myself occasionally, but not nearly as often as when I use freephoneline. That being said, if I look at the call status page while the issue is occuring on freephoneline, I see no packet loss, a jitter buffer of about 100 ms and interinterval jitter of 5-10 ms. Really nothing alarming. With google voice the jitter buffer seems to be a little shorter, but there really isn't any other major difference besides that.
(3) DECT handset crapping out.
I'm leaning more and more towards this but I feel like I might be kind of biased since this seems like the easiest fix
. What I've found is that if someone else is on one handset and their voice is starting to become choppy to the call receiver, if I pick up another handset and listen in on the conversation, their voice sounds choppy to me too. To me that suggests that the handset base itself is receiving choppy audio and then re-transmitting that to the handset I'm listening on as well as to the Obi200. To further assess that, I used the record feature on the Obi100 call status page and the outgoing voice becomes choppy in those recordings too.
If the problem were with freephoneline, wouldn't the Obihai record our voice clearly (prior to the audio being sent out to the internet)? Also, if the problem were with freephoneline I believe we would see a bit more packet loss and jitter buffer issues. But then again, if the phone is at fault, that doesn't explain why the issue tends to happen in the evening and seems to happen less often with google voice.
Any help would be appreciated. I know figuring this out would be as simple as plugging another phone into the Obihai but I don't really have access to one now and it might be a while before I do.
