Obi to Obi call quality question...

[Robert.Thompson]

Hello:

I have never used the Obi to Obi call feature but I am considering setting up another Obi at a friend's house.

Is the call quality very good (POTS like) or just so so?

Thanks.

[ProfTech]

I have limited experience with Obi to Obi calls but I think it will depend on two things;

1. The quality of your friends internet connection
2. The quality / type of home network they have.

My Son-in-law has an Obi in the Chicago area running ATT U-Verse DSL and his Mom has an Obi in India. I have one in Illinois on standard ATT DSL.

If I call him on his Obi number, it sounds fine. When he calls the Obi located in India or she calls him, he complains about dropped calls, call quality, etc. This also happens when they call each other using CallCentric's network.

So I am pretty sure their internet connection and / or their home network in India is the culprit and there isn't much we can do to improve the situation.

[lk96]

As was noted before, you do need a good quality line. Not so much a fast line
(I think that even something like 300Kbps, in both directions, effective capacity would be fine).
But the line has to be "clean" so that you don't experience excessive packet loss.

I have setup a remote Obi in Europe (Greece) and another one in the US.
The voice quality is consistently very good.

In terms of calls to India, I have noticed (as the previous responder mentioned) issues.
Part of the problem is that some standard DSL services are providing 256Kbps uplink.
But even more problematic was that some times there were packet losses. So, the quality would
vary by the day. But I wouldn't attribute the problem to the Obi itself. There is
little the Obi can do if the network drops pkts left and right.

EDIT: In both setups I meant to say that all calls are Obi-to-Obi over the Obitalk network.

L.

[MurrayB]

I fork all incoming call between two locations in the US via the ObiTalk Network and I typically can not tell the difference.

[Robert.Thompson]

Thank you!

When you talk about a 'clean' line, I assume you mean the Internet connect, right?

Or, do you mean that if I used say Anveo or VoIP.ms I would get a 'cleaner line' for VoIP?

Thanks.

[lk96]

I was referring to the internet connection.
But to be more precise what matters is the end-to-end Internet connectivity:
from the source Obi, through the source home network, through the public Internet
all the way to the other end.

L.

[Robert.Thompson]

Thank you.

[shap]

As far as I remember (tested it a while ago), when Obi 1 makes a call to Obi 2 (using ObiNetwork), the call is still routed to ObiTalk servers at Amazon cloud - it is not p2p.

[lk96]

Do you recall if that was for signaling traffic and call setup? or for the
actual audio flows too?

[Ostracus]

Didn't RonR say it was just the signaling and setup?

[infin8loop]

Didn't RonR say it was just the signaling and setup?

I think I recall RonR stating this.

Looking at the OBi Call Status page while a call is in progress between my two Obi's the Peer RTP Address and Local RTP Address are those of my OBis. This would seem to indicate the RTP voice packets are delivered straight from OBi to OBi.  The setup part (SIP or SIP-like-Obi-secret-protocol) has to go through the OBiTALK server in order to obtain the IP address of the registered target (far-end) OBi being called.