Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):Troubleshooting VoIP Quality Issues

VoIP: Troubleshooting VoIP Quality Issues

The speech quality of VoIP depends considerably on the characteristics of the individual underlying network.

If you have a poor internet connection or problems on your internal network, you are likely to see all sorts of problems with your voice traffic which may show up as poor quality sound, clipping of voice, loss of audio completely, or even Dalek sounding voice.

There are many tests that can be undertaken to assess the quality of your internet/network connections.
We suggest these test are performed at various times during the day to get an overall picture of you internet connection.

Running the traceroute application can determine if you are having problems connecting to freevirtualnumbers.co.uk servers.
This will also show if you have any Latency issues in your connection. (Round trip times)

Running the Brix Network Test your VoIP application will give you an indication of the Mean Opinion Score that your connection is experiencing. The detailed report that this application produces will also enable you to track down where your network connection is failing. This application can be found at http://www.testyourvoip.com.
As this application does not involve any freevirtualnumbers.co.uk servers it will help you to determine if the problem is a connection to freevirtualnumbers.co.uk or a problem in general with your internet connection. It is best that you run this application from the same connection that your VoIP device is using.

The following are some of the things you need to look for in your testing of your network connection.

In case of congestion at some point of the network packets may arrive out of order or simply with considerable, and/or varying delay. ( Delay Jitter) An efficient speech communication cannot be carried out if the transmission delay becomes too large.
Hence , packets arriving too late for timely playback may be discarded by the receiver. (Packet Loss) Similarly, if a router in the network is faced with too many packets during a traffic-burst period, it may have to drop packets. (Packet Drop)

Latency Figures should be as low as possible with a maximum value of 150ms, anything outside this maximum figure will result in unuseable VoIP communication.