VOIP Tech Chat → Recent Vonage Quality

I have had Vonage for over a year now, and have been pretty impressed with the quality, until a couple weeks ago.

Now, all my conversations through Vonage are very choppy and the quality is so bad, that I am resorting to using my regular phone instead of Vonage to make long distance calls.

Has anyone had a similar experience?

I've only had Vonage for about a week so I really can't say too much as to the quality. I have noticed when calling my number and speaking with my fiancé, every once and in a while it will sound like she is slurring her words. Either she's picked up a speech impediment or the quality drops temporarily. Most likely the later. I've checked my Upload and it's normally around 180Kb. That should adequately maintain one line with no other internet traffic on the line. Does anyone know what the IP address is of the Vonage server that our ATAs talk to? I'd like to ping it everyone in a while to see how the packets are doing.

yes and in particular on the weekends. It's like every weekend lately Vonage's servers are overloaded. Most of the time I have very decent quality. During the daytime hours are bad though for the past several weekends.

Do you hear this Vonage! It's getting old guys...fix it

I dunno. My cable broadband has been all screwed up lately (130ms pings to my gateway, less than 300kbps down). It looks like they just managed to fixed things over the past couple of days. I've had Vonage since May and haven't really had any issues with it. Since I moved to a place where we have a really low upload cap (128kbps) I have switched to the "normal" setting in bandwidth saver. Also use a QoS router. Have had no problems other than those caused by the recent latency issues.

I would suggest you try the "normal" setting in bandwidth saver if you haven't done so already. Also, before you blame Vonage check your broadband connection. The quality of cable broadband can fluctuate wildly depending upon how service oriented your provider is.

No trouble here either...

It might be more a broadband congestion between you and the vonage server and not a vonage problem...

I'm having some quality issues as well, as late as 2 hours ago. I get disconnected after the other line picks up, or the quality is so choppy that I have to call back using my cell phone.

What gives?

S13

said by Section13:

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I'm having some quality issues as well, as late as 2 hours ago. I get disconnected after the other line picks up, or the quality is so choppy that I have to call back using my cell phone.

What gives?

S13

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Not home today - but was one the vonage phone for several hours yesterday during the day and evening with no probs.... I only have a very short distance between OOL (my Broadband) and Vonage on the public internet (hops and my ping is typically 14-18ms) - that might make a difference in chances of congestion along the way...

Well the only issues I've had with Vonage today have been totally because of my broadband connection. The connection has been down already once today and there is a load of latency and slow throughput. Probably an increase of traffic because just about everyone around here has stayed home to sit out the hurricane that's headed this way.

Does it really make a difference how close one is to the Vonage servers? I thought they were involved in call setup but once the call was setup, they weren't involved.

Although every call has to go through Vonage's servers to get setup, does every call continue to consume bandwidth in and out of Vonage's servers?

For instance, I always assumed that when my neighbor calls my Vonage phone, their call is routed to XO Communications (the CLEC who owns my Vonage number where I live) and from there, it passes through a gateway that gets routed to my ATA186. Do those packets travel through Vonage and back to me or once the call is setup, does it travel to directly to my ATA requiring a minimal amount of routing/hops?

I am pretty sure that if you are behind NAT the only way to make SIP work is through a translation server... I don't know how Vonage does that exactly but I suspect the have a couple of those in the US...

What is the Vonage server IP address so that I may ping/trace it? Thanks.

Hi:

Well, I just did a bit of poking around with my DTA on Packet8, and ethereal on my linux router.

It appears the way P8 is working now, is that the call setup /teardown and management is done from the main SIP proxy servers, which are all in Cali. However, the bulk of the data, over UDP, rides on a server that is much closer to me, in NYC. ( fa0.nycmny1-egw131.bbnplanet.net )
This is the actual voice data. Now I tested this calling a bunch of local access numbers around the country. Once or twice, when calling Cali numbers, I got connected to a server in Cali, but all the rest of the time I was out of this NYC server, which I have excellent ping-times to (20-30 ms).

Before the P8 upgrade, I also was testing this, and all calls were being offloaded to a server in California, basically where the proxy servers are. It seems with this upgrade, P8 has distributed around some more voice-load (please forgive me on the names of stuff) servers to at least the east coast (NYC) if not other areas.

So, to answer your question, hopefully the voice data you are using to talk with, is being gatewayed thru some server that is reasonably close to, maybe closer than the core Vonage servers.

Thanks,

- Stefan

said by rradina:

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Does it really make a difference how close one is to the Vonage servers? I thought they were involved in call setup but once the call was setup, they weren't involved.

Although every call has to go through Vonage's servers to get setup, does every call continue to consume bandwidth in and out of Vonage's servers?

For instance, I always assumed that when my neighbor calls my Vonage phone, their call is routed to XO Communications (the CLEC who owns my Vonage number where I live) and from there, it passes through a gateway that gets routed to my ATA186. Do those packets travel through Vonage and back to me or once the call is setup, does it travel to directly to my ATA requiring a minimal amount of routing/hops?

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said by chex5:

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Well, I just did a bit of poking around with my DTA on Packet8, and ethereal on my linux router.

It appears the way P8 is working now, is that the call setup /teardown and management is done from the main SIP proxy servers, which are all in Cali. However, the bulk of the data, over UDP, rides on a server that is much closer to me, in NYC. ( fa0.nycmny1-egw131.bbnplanet.net )
This is the actual voice data. Now I tested this calling a bunch of local access numbers around the country. Once or twice, when calling Cali numbers, I got connected to a server in Cali, but all the rest of the time I was out of this NYC server, which I have excellent ping-times to (20-30 ms).

Before the P8 upgrade, I also was testing this, and all calls were being offloaded to a server in California, basically where the proxy servers are. It seems with this upgrade, P8 has distributed around some more voice-load (please forgive me on the names of stuff) servers to at least the east coast (NYC) if not other areas.

So, to answer your question, hopefully the voice data you are using to talk with, is being gatewayed thru some server that is reasonably close to, maybe closer than the core Vonage servers.

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Thanks chex that is some good info. Has anybody done the same thing with Vonage and verified the RTP data path?

Thanks! Even though this information doesn't apply to Vonage, we can probably assume that they are doing something similar.

I've always thought it was nuts to have every call pass through Vonage's Edison, NJ servers. They might but it would be much more logical for them to contract with some sort of gateway in the vicinity of each rate center that they add to their network.

blohner As far as going through a translation server (whatever that is -- not being a smartass, I really don't know...) to make SIP work when it's behind NAT, I don't necessarily agree. NAT can support sessions. Since some folks have reported ATA problems when their routers don't allow for long DHCP leases, I'm guessing that the ATA sets up a session to the proxy server so that the proxy can talk back to it, on-demand, through NAT. If the DHCP session times out, the router closes the session and that foils this scheme. Regardless, if the call setup involves the SIP proxy telling the ATA to contact a local POTS gateway to setup a session through NAT for the voice data, I would think that the remainder of the call could be done between the POTS gateway and the ATA with no need for service from the call setup servers. When the call is complete, I'm guessing that the gateway then bills Vonage for the interconnect fees by including source and destination numbers and duration.

All this is just a guess based on what could be happening based on NAT session capabilities and information provided by chex.

In my opinion, the real key to dealing with NAT/firewalls is getting the device behind NAT/a firewall (i.e. behind a curtain) to setup a session with an outside source. The rest of the world contacts the outside source which then uses the active session to signal the device behind the curtain. Once you contact the device, it's easy to get it to do anything you want...

I had the joy of being on the phone w/ Microsoft Tech support today for a total or 170 minutes (per my dashboard), while downloading 4 large files off KaZaA and had not one issue w/ my Vonage line. Call waiting worked perfect during this call as well.

Thought I'd share after reporting issues yesterday.

S13

said by Placeman:

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Does anyone know what the IP address is of the Vonage server that our ATAs talk to? I'd like to ping it everyone in a while to see how the packets are doing.

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Try 12.144.47.38

This IP came from a Vonage engineer. Their CS folks don't seem to be on the same page as the IP's they gave me were 'old' ones per the engineer???

Please post if this has changed in the last 3 weeks...

Your quite welcome, I did that project on a whim, but I would be curious to have others packet-sniff thier VOIP device to try to desern whats going on behind the scenes, for reliability information. Like I found it very comforting to know that my RTP voice path is NOT going to Cali and back from Boston, but only to NYC and back for calls I make around here at home.

If anyone uses a unix/linux router , and wants some help using a packet program like ethereal, drop me a line.

- Chex

said by Automate:

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Thanks chex that is some good info. Has anybody done the same thing with Vonage and verified the RTP data path?

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