Audio cuts out - Obi202

[rickscats]

I have Obi202 and GoogleVoice. Internet is through a Verizon MiFi. Speeds are good - about 12 to 15 Mbps up and down. Call quality is quite good unless someone is accessing internet while a call is in progress then audio gets very choppy. I have tried various experiments with the minimal QOS settings I have available on my router (Netgear WMDR3300) with no difference. I tried a crude experiment by performing a speed test with and without a call going on. With no call in progress speed is 12 to 15 Mbps up and down. With a call in progress speed drops to about 2 Mbps. I do not believe Obi can possibly be hogging 10 Mbps of bandwidth. Any ideas anyone? Is it corrects that GV can only use 711U codec? Do I need a router with more sophisticated QOS ability? Any suggestions will be appreciated. Thanks.

[lk96]

I will only speculate here:
for sure the obi bandwidth usage for a single call using G711U should be in the order
of 80-100kbps (that is kilobits). I have measured this before.

So the bandwidth loss may be due to some networking component on the path (ie your router)
not handling efficiently some type of traffic and this processing overload results in reduction
of overall bandwidth the device can handle rather than reduction in the internet connectivity bandwidth.

If you have any special handlers (ie ALG) enabled in your router, you may want to experiment and disable them.

One way to eliminate or validate this whole theory though is if you try a different router or eliminate the router
altogether and use the 202 to do the router/firewalling (see also comments below):
in this case you can connect a plain ethernet switch
on the LAN port of the 202 to connect more than one home devices to the internet.
(Note: I never used the 202 in any mode other than L2 bridging mode so I only assume that
it will work properly and as advertised in routing/firewall mode).

In terms of Qos: a simple way to enforce some traffic guarantees is to let the obi202 do that for you:
that is, reverse the order of connectivity in your home network to be like:

MiFi adaptor -> Obi202 -> Netgear firewall -> (ethernet switch optional) -> home devices

In this case, the phone traffic is not getting multiplexed with all the other home traffic except
within the Obi. And the obi should be able to distinguish between voice sessions from the rest.
Since you netgear is a fairly basic model, I'd guess that the Obi can also do some of the firewalling.
And in this case, you probably can eliminate the netgear altogether.
Again a disclaimer is that I haven't tested this with Obi202 but while I was browsing around it gave
me the impression that it has the logic to take care of this.

Let us know how it works out.

L.

[lk96]

One more thing to do is to make sure you Obi's ethernet ports are configured
for full-duplex and 100BT speed/modes.

Personally I doubt that this will change anything for you but nevertheless
in using full-duplex as the default mode seems the right config to me.

There have been several postings how to do that so do a quick search. Or if
someone has that info handy, please post as well.

L.

[Bluegrill]

lk96 -
Thanks for your reply. I have continued to experiment with this. I have set the Obi202 Internet port to 100BT. I have tried a router with DD-WRT installed thinking the QOS settings might be more effective than a stock Netgear. I have tried enabling QOS on the Obi202. Nothing seems to make a difference. The only thing I cannot try is connecting the MiFi adaptor directly to the Obi202. The MiFi is a Novatel/Verizon 4620LE which only connects via WiFi directly to a router configured to use WiFi as WAN. I have tried setting QOS on 3 different routers with only the Obi and 1 computer connected. Tried setting the lan port for the Obi to highest priority and tried setting the MAC address of the Obi to highest priority. Nothing makes a difference. I'm kind of out of ideas except maybe trying a Callcentric number using the 729 codec which, if I understand correctly, uses less bandwidth. My understanding is that GV only uses 711U. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[lk96]

using G729 or iLBC most likely won't help. I'm using both G729 and iLBC
and the bandwidth used is around 35kbps and 20kbps respectively (give or take some)
So you will "save" 50 or 70kbps. If the issue of your voice chopinness is due to packet drops
due to some overload on one of the boxes, then the above savings won't make much of dent
because the core issue of packet drops won't be addressed.

I'm not using mifi and neither had so some of the question are shooting a bit in the dark:

1. you reported originally that when there is a call going on and then someone tries to access the net
the available bandwidth drops significantly: what if there are mutliple people in the house
that do some net access at the same time? in that case the throughput remains high? did you measure
what the throughput is when one computer is just measuring bandwidth while the others are accessing the internet?

2. given what you said that you tested with DD-wrt and experimented with some equipment rearrangement,
the one component that is common across your experiments is the MiFi thingy. So may be
it is doing some throttling or tries to act super smart with the traffic that goes through it?
(btw, I had seen a situation where my cable box would crash when I'll use Google drive. Not
the same problem you see but it was in the same class of "what the heck" moments)

Here is one thing to try. It's not a solution yet but more trying to figure out what is going on.
You reported that when a call is going on and someone access the net the available bandwidth
is something like 2mbps. So let try to do the following: can you apply a bandwidth limiter (aka shaper)
for the outgoing traffic on all the ports on your router and set it to something like 1mbps ?

The theory here is that, even if netgear or dd-wrt or Obi is prioritizing traffic, the traffic
load that arrives at mifi is lets say 15mbps. But you also reported
that when a call is going on, the available bandwidth gets down to 1-2Mbps. So, lets drop the "aggregate" traffic that is going to hit mifi before it gets merged with the rest of your home traffic. So do explore
if you can set bandwidth limits on the ports and try the above. Depending on the outcome
and measurements, we will try to determine the next step.

btw, do you hear the audio chopiness on your end? or the other end reports chopiness to you ?

L.

[Bluegrill]

Thank you very much. You have given me some great ideas to fool around with. I will try all of this tomorrow when my wife is not here asking me why I have the phones turned off yet AGAIN. I'll be in touch. Thanks for the help.

[lk96]

you are telling me that my wife is not the exception in having zero tolerance to unscheduled
phone outages

[rickscats]

Some results to report. I have tried running speedtest while simultaneously accessing other websites (Amazon, ebay, etc.) Very little reduction in speed test. Today I'm getting about 20 Mbps download and 15Mbps up. Speed drops about 10% with simultaneous surfing but no phone call.

Tried QOS on the Obi again with no change seen enabled or disabled. Still getting that same extreme bandwidth drop with a call in progress. Audio cutouts are worse on the Obi end of the call whether it is an incoming or outgoing call. The other end of the call hears only a little "clicking" noise.

I do not seem to have a router where I can set bandwidth limits on individual ports as you suggested. One router I have allows setting an overall upload limit, but I don't thinks that will accomplish isolating the Obi.

I am agreeing with you that it points to the MiFi trying to do something but I do not see anything in the MiFi settings to disable this behaviour.

After more reading and thinking I have come up with another idea. I have ordered the Obi WiFi adapter from Amazon. It will be here Wednesday (got to love Amazon Prime). If I understand the device, I should be able to connect to the MiFi hotspot via the Obi WiFi leaving the Obi202 completely disconnected rom any router. Apparently other people have done this. I will report.

[rickscats]

By the way, I seem to have inadvertently created 2 different user names, rickscats and Bluegrill. I didn't mean to do that. Sorry if it causes confusion on the forum.

[Shale]

The only thing I cannot try is connecting the MiFi adaptor directly to the Obi202. The MiFi is a Novatel/Verizon 4620LE which only connects via WiFi directly to a router configured to use WiFi as WAN.

Having a router using WiFi as its WAN connection is new to me. I guess you are saying that the Netgear WMDR3300 has a setting for that. What do they call that setting; I would like to read more about that. I presume that the unique SSID for the MiFi is only used by the router to access the WAN and is not being used by any other device. It seems worth checking for that on each device to make sure that each are using the LAN SSID and not the MiFi SSID.

[rickscats]

Shale-
A stock Netgear wndr3300 does not have the WiFi as Wan setting. You have to convert it to dd-wrt. Cradlepoint has a few models that have that function, the MBR95 being the least expensive at around $100. It actually has 2 separate wifi radios - one for wan and one for lan.These routers are necessary for the Novatel/Verizon 4620 which has no ethernet port - only wifi.

[rickscats]

I received the Obi WiFi. I disconnected the ethernet cable from the Obi202 and plugged in the WiFi dongle. It obtains its IP address from the Verizon hotspot. The VOIP stream is no longer going through a router. (Well, technically it is going through the wifi router in the verizon hotspot) Now everything seems to be good. No speed reduction when accessing internet while a call is in progress. No audio cutouts. I can't think of a good reason why this setup should work so much better but it does. Hope this helps anyone who has a Verizon MiFi. Thanks to LK for the suggestions.