Help

If you find that you are having issues with the quality of the audio you are receiving then there are a few things to consider.

In the first instance, it is worth determining if the issue is with callers hearing you or you hearing callers or both.

If you can hear your callers fine, but your callers are complaining that you are breaking up or it sounds jittery and you are operating on an ADSL or Cable broadband connection then the issue is likely to be bandwidth related. Most ADSL connections give a small amount of bandwidth in the upstream direction and significantly more in the downstream; as most web browsing follows this pattern.

Do I have a bandwidth issue

You can quickly check if bandwidth is an issue by using a reliable speed test service such as speedtest.net to check your upstream and downstream. To operate an Internet phone reliably with uncompressed voice (which our service uses by default) you need at least 150kbps or 0.15Mbps in upstream and downstream bandwidth. If you'll have more than one call in progress at any given time then you should add 100kbps for each additional call.

When you check your bandwidth, try to do it around the same time as you are experiencing the issue. Otherwise your test may not be valid.

What do I do if I have a bandwidth issue

If you've checked and you know that bandwidth is an issue, talk to your ISP and point out the problem.

If they refuse to accept it or advise you that there is nothing that they can do then you may want to consider moving to another provider (have a look for providers that have their own infrastructure such as BE or Sky)

If you don't want to go as far as changing provider, or you simply live far from your exchange, you may have to accept lower bandwidth. You can still operate the Soho66 service, by using a compression codec. We'd recommend GSM, it's the same codec as mobile networks use and so you'll already know that the quality is fair.

GSM uses just 30kbps (or 0.03Mbps) and so even the most measly broadband connection should ensure no loss in quality. Check the user manual for your phone on how to alter the preference on voice codecs (sometimes called vocoders)

My bandwidth is fine and I still have an issue

This is a very rare circumstance, but does happen from time to time. Get in touch with us directly and we can do some detailed traces to establish what the problem is and correct.