Common causes of audio quality issues
When supporting customers, we find that the most common cause of call audio quality issues is the quality and capacity of the customers' Internet connection.
This is especially true if you find that you can hear your callers fine, but they sometimes struggle to hear you.
Symptoms of broadband/ Ihnternet connection issues are:
- Caller complaining of audio breaking up or jittery
- Calls dropping at random points during the call
- Long periods of no audio or audio being lost completely
- Lots of delay on the call - in either direction
Other causes of dropped calls
Dropped calls in particular can be caused by issues other than broadband connection quality. On occasion, routers can block some of our traffic. This can be resolved by opening the port ranges from 8060 to 8090 on UDP traffic.
How to check your connection
You can check the quality and capacity of your connection pretty easily using two external resources:
- speedtest.net can help you to perform a speed test on your line to inform you of what sort of connection speed you have. You need a minimum of 150kbps (that's 0.15 Mbps) up and down for a single VoIP phone and an additional 120kbps (0.12 Mbps) for each additional phone you have. Pay particular attention to the upstream value reported.
- pingtest.net tests the quality of your connection rather than just the speed. You really need a grade B or above connection for a good VoIP service.
Try to run tests on both of these sites at points in the day when you are experiencing the problem.
Other tests
If your tests come back ok, or you need any other advice, then get in touch with us: we can run a 24 hour trace on your Internet connection, which will give us some more specific data on the quality of the route between your ISP and our servers.
