Very Poor Call Quality
Posted: Sat Oct 31, 2009 9:28 pm
Hello ... new Ooma user here. I am having major call quality issues with Ooma, and am hoping someone here would be able to offer some helpful advice. I am a long-time VoIP user, and have been using Vonage since July 2003. The entire time I've been on Vonage I've also been on Comcast cable, and while I'm not particularly thrilled with the Comcast service I have had fairly consistent VoIP calls through their network over the years.
Recently I decided to finally ditch Vonage for something more reasonably priced, as all of the fees and other charges over the years have steadily rose until my $24.95 account was billing me at $35.00 or so per month. Call quality with Vonage has also went down over the last year, so this week I finally pulled the trigger on a Hub / Scout unit from Amazon.
Hookup was easy, and I used the recommended Modem --> Ooma --> Router method. Call quality is actually pretty good until my home network starts getting busy. For instance, I can talk on Ooma and sound fine to the other party, but as soon as iTunes starts a podcast download that's it - the other end can barely understand me. The same is true if my wife watches a Netflix streaming video while there is an active Ooma call. It is always the other party that hears the choppiness, so this is definitely an upstream issue.
I ran the recommended speed test from these forums, and although I can't find the advanced tab everyone is talking about my results always come back in the "radio" quality section of the chart. Speed tests on various sites always return a fairly consistent 8.00 - 10.00 Mb/s down and 1.00 - 2.00 Mb/s up. Here is what I've tried so far. Please bear with the length of this post - I've really been testing hard on things today:
1) Modem --> Ooma --> Airport Extreme. Quality is acceptable as long as the internal network isn't busy. Once internal traffic picks up, the other (upstream) party hears quite a bit of choppiness and cutouts of my voice. It is still usable, but barely.
2) Modem --> Airport Extreme --> Ooma. Quality is actually better behind the router with an unloaded LAN. When LAN traffic picks up however Ooma becomes unusable. The choppiness and cutouts are so bad you cannot carry on a conversation. This makes sense, as the Airport Extreme has no QoS, and was a primary reason I bought Ooma.
3) Modem --> Linksys 54G (with QoS) --> Ooma. Quality is acceptable as long as the internal network isn't busy. Once the LAN traffic picks up this suffers the same issues as Ooma's own QoS - it just doesn't seem to be able to prioritize the traffic well enough for a clear call. A simply Netflix movie, or Podcast download (not at the same time) was enough to kill the call.
4) Modem --> Airport Extreme --> Vonage. Quality isn't as good as Ooma on an unloaded LAN. Quality is horrible when network traffic is high, and completely unusable due to AEBS lack of QoS. This has been my problem with Vonage for the last year or so, and was part of my decision to dump them, along with the price increases.
5) Skype on iPhone --> Airport Extreme. Quality is perfect. No matter what is going on with the LAN (podcasts, movies, torrents, etc). Honestly, this totally surprised me. No matter how hard I beat up the LAN, I cannot get Skype to miss a beat. There is no QoS going on with Skype either, as mentioned the AEBS does not do any QoS.
While I had Ooma connected directly to the modem (Modem --> Ooma -- AEBS) I tweaked the QoS settings until I was blue in the face. I tried at the default of 384 up / 0 down with poor results. I set it to 512 up, 768 up, 1024 up - didn't seem to matter. If the network was busy internally, call quality was pretty bad. Honestly it just seems like the Ooma QoS just isn't very good at prioritizing the traffic.
I know this is a lot of information, but any help anyone could provide would be greatly appreciated. I am trying really hard to love Ooma, but the Skype experiment has me considering other options now. I simply cannot explain why neither Ooma or Vonage work well on my connection while Skype works perfectly. Ooma would be great if the QoS worked like it should, but honestly I can't see that it is doing so.
Here's to hoping someone can toss me a magic bullet that makes Ooma sing!
Recently I decided to finally ditch Vonage for something more reasonably priced, as all of the fees and other charges over the years have steadily rose until my $24.95 account was billing me at $35.00 or so per month. Call quality with Vonage has also went down over the last year, so this week I finally pulled the trigger on a Hub / Scout unit from Amazon.
Hookup was easy, and I used the recommended Modem --> Ooma --> Router method. Call quality is actually pretty good until my home network starts getting busy. For instance, I can talk on Ooma and sound fine to the other party, but as soon as iTunes starts a podcast download that's it - the other end can barely understand me. The same is true if my wife watches a Netflix streaming video while there is an active Ooma call. It is always the other party that hears the choppiness, so this is definitely an upstream issue.
I ran the recommended speed test from these forums, and although I can't find the advanced tab everyone is talking about my results always come back in the "radio" quality section of the chart. Speed tests on various sites always return a fairly consistent 8.00 - 10.00 Mb/s down and 1.00 - 2.00 Mb/s up. Here is what I've tried so far. Please bear with the length of this post - I've really been testing hard on things today:
1) Modem --> Ooma --> Airport Extreme. Quality is acceptable as long as the internal network isn't busy. Once internal traffic picks up, the other (upstream) party hears quite a bit of choppiness and cutouts of my voice. It is still usable, but barely.
2) Modem --> Airport Extreme --> Ooma. Quality is actually better behind the router with an unloaded LAN. When LAN traffic picks up however Ooma becomes unusable. The choppiness and cutouts are so bad you cannot carry on a conversation. This makes sense, as the Airport Extreme has no QoS, and was a primary reason I bought Ooma.
3) Modem --> Linksys 54G (with QoS) --> Ooma. Quality is acceptable as long as the internal network isn't busy. Once the LAN traffic picks up this suffers the same issues as Ooma's own QoS - it just doesn't seem to be able to prioritize the traffic well enough for a clear call. A simply Netflix movie, or Podcast download (not at the same time) was enough to kill the call.
4) Modem --> Airport Extreme --> Vonage. Quality isn't as good as Ooma on an unloaded LAN. Quality is horrible when network traffic is high, and completely unusable due to AEBS lack of QoS. This has been my problem with Vonage for the last year or so, and was part of my decision to dump them, along with the price increases.
5) Skype on iPhone --> Airport Extreme. Quality is perfect. No matter what is going on with the LAN (podcasts, movies, torrents, etc). Honestly, this totally surprised me. No matter how hard I beat up the LAN, I cannot get Skype to miss a beat. There is no QoS going on with Skype either, as mentioned the AEBS does not do any QoS.
While I had Ooma connected directly to the modem (Modem --> Ooma -- AEBS) I tweaked the QoS settings until I was blue in the face. I tried at the default of 384 up / 0 down with poor results. I set it to 512 up, 768 up, 1024 up - didn't seem to matter. If the network was busy internally, call quality was pretty bad. Honestly it just seems like the Ooma QoS just isn't very good at prioritizing the traffic.
I know this is a lot of information, but any help anyone could provide would be greatly appreciated. I am trying really hard to love Ooma, but the Skype experiment has me considering other options now. I simply cannot explain why neither Ooma or Vonage work well on my connection while Skype works perfectly. Ooma would be great if the QoS worked like it should, but honestly I can't see that it is doing so.
Here's to hoping someone can toss me a magic bullet that makes Ooma sing!