I have customers using VoIP (Voneage mainly) and some tell me that it gets very noisy and hard to hear other parties at times. I understand that all outgoing calls on Voneage go through a New Jersey server and I see on the Voneage speedtest very slow speeds and high latency (we are on the Pacific side of N.A.) of over 90 ms at peak times. I am told that Voneage says tha 90 ms is the maximum latecy for a good call.
We are running Hardware Scheduling.
Has anyone had similar experience?
Would using the Canopy High Priority Channels help? Does Voneage even set the Low Latency bit (bit 3) so that this is worthwhile?
Would anyone in the north-west recommend any local VoIP where calls are not routed across the country?
Unfortunately I don’t have the answer to your question but I can tell you that we have customers using Vonage as well as Skype. Our customers with Skype are really happy with it, the Vonage customers kind of like it but not a whole lot.
We are running HWS without the high-priority channels. I’ve personally talked on one of my customers Skype phones and it works fine.
We’re in the South East though so not sure how much that’s going to help you - just a bit of real-world experience.'
Edit: The customers are only getting 1.5-2mb down and 256-512k up.
You would need a CPE router that can tag the Vonage traffic as I don’t think Vonage does it by default. Then you can tag that as high priority on the Canopy network.
What are your ping times from the customer to your gateway?
What does a tracert reveal as the longest hop. It may not even be you but someone your provider peers with.
The ping times to our gateway are OK, about 15-20 ms.
The tracert usually slows down in the middle of the US. It shows that the network as Level3 that routes from Seattle-Denver-Chicago-New York.
I don’t believe it is our Canopy system, hence why I am looking for a local provider.
Let me add a bit more information. We have come close to BH capacity at times and this is when we have the worst situation.
Obviously we need to increase our BH capacity but would adding High Priority in our network help?
Welcome to Level 3. I used to work with a company that resold DSL and had their hardware colocated with Level 3.
We had a -TON- of lag spikes. You would ping a server that was in the other room and it would route it halfway around the country before coming back.
I understand how the routing, etc. works. I just can’t believe they have like 10 hops all around before it comes back.
Thats crazy…
its probably better to be on the other side of the world
I am in Colombia and I use Skype to talk to my family in Ecuador and works fine.
We use Canopy SM’s on both ends. I think the problem that you are havong may be related to bandwith.
Vonage service can be configure to use up to 150K of bandwith to place 1 call. Talk to your Vonage user and ask him to check the configuration that he is using.
Moved my home phone over to Vonage - works perfectly. No stutters, or drops.
I also use Skype frequently to talk to my brother who lives in Mexico (I am in California). Sounds like I am calling down the street.
For VoIP to work generally you need to make sure either you bandwidth is not getting starved somewhere in your network, has low variance and ping times or you need to have the VoIP packets marked for priority throughout your entire network.
We set the High Priority field on the SM in HWS for Vonage customers.
The rest of our network is set to prioritize these packets.
Can’t speek for Vonage quality at their servers routing through the entire internet. That has been a problem at times.
Sterling,
Can I confirm what you need to set in the rest of your network for High Priority?
Do you just enable the High Priority Data Queue in the Back Haul Master’s and Slave’s?
You should set the High Priority queue, but it still depends on the devices setting a packet mark for high priority as well.
So if you are bandwidth starved at times you will need to take a good look at your traffic and make sure the clients are using priority marking devices. Otherwise there is nothing you can do except reserve traffic for them with normal priority CIR settings.
I believe Vonage devices (LinksysPAP/Sipura) do mark the packets so it generally works for their service.
Others should too if they use standard SIP protocols and similar hardware.