VoIP problems: internet provider or VoIP provider?

December 20, 2005 12:41 PM

My VoIP is horrible today - calls dropping constantly. This is not new, but it's at an all-time high and is impossible to use the line for business. How do I know if it's the VoIP provider, or is this my broadband service (it's cable modem)? Who do I call and complain to?
posted by micawber to computers & internet (7 comments total)

The Hawking Broadband "booster" does some quality of service magic and apparently helps VoIP quality. I dunno if it helps if the problem is upstream though.

If your cable provider is Rogers in Canada, the easy answer is that there's no one you can call - they don't care.
posted by GuyZero at 12:58 PM on December 20, 2005

You can ping various sites like so:

ping -t google.com

then control-c to stop it

Now see if you're dropping and packets and the time (in ms) it takes to reach various sites. If you're losing any packets or your time is near 100ms then your broadband connection has a problem.

DSLreports also has an easy to use line quality tool.

Also, if anyone on your LAN is using the connection for file sharing, streaming radio, etc then they could be causing the problem. Viruses and worms can also utilize all your bandwidth.
posted by skallas at 1:06 PM on December 20, 2005

I had a similar problem recently, and discovered after several calls to both the cable and VoIP companies, that my cable modem was not DOCSIS 2.0 compliant, since it was several years old. After replacing it, call quality improved quite a bit.
posted by odinsdream at 1:08 PM on December 20, 2005

I should mention that this is cable modem (time warner roadrunner in nyc) and that I am on a mac. But I did ping some sites and I have 0% packet loss. no one else besides me is here, there are no file sharing or bittorrent or anything else going on, and I am on a mac and there are no viruses or worms.

I rebooted both the cable modem and the phone modem and we'll see if that helps.
posted by micawber at 1:13 PM on December 20, 2005

Could it be that a lot of people in NYC are telecommuting today?
posted by TonyRobots at 2:17 PM on December 20, 2005

I second odinsdream's experience - I was given a replacement DOCSIS 2.0 modem (a motorola surfboard) at no charge just a week ago.
posted by wzcx at 2:40 PM on December 20, 2005

I'll third odinstream's experience -- I started having similar trouble with VOIP awhile back, and replaced my ancient (relatively speaking) pre-DOCSIS RCA cable modem with a more up-to-date one, and not only did my VOIP become rock solid, my download speeds in general improved singificantly.

I suspect that this was the result over time of them optimizing the network for the newer modems, until finally mine was too out-of-spec to do the job. The problems didn't surface in simple stuff like web browsing, and I didn't notice much packet loss in pings either, but call quality just became crappy, with lots of digital artifacts and disconnects.

The downside was that the cable co. were not interested in replacing their "rented" modem at their cost, and the price difference for "byo" was negligible, but the $75 or so out of pocket to replace it myself with an over-the-counter model was well worthwhile.
posted by nonliteral at 10:41 PM on December 20, 2005