Troubleshooting Call Quality Issues

Call quality problems are typically caused by network issues such as inadequate bandwidth, latency, jitter and packet loss. Our customers need to have the following minimum network requirements in order to have decent call quality.

Bandwidth: Each call needs bandwidth of at least 100 kbps per active call plus possibly more if you're doing your calls on lines that are also handling data. If you will be doing video calls then it will take even more bandwidth. So if you might be having as many as 10 active calls (and no data nor video transfer) then you would need speeds of 1,000 kbps (1 mbps) minimum for both uploads and downloads. This can be tested at www.speedtest.net or www.bandwidthplace.com and testing should be done during peak traffic times.

Latency: This is basically network speed delays and should be less than 100 milliseconds.

Jitter (Packet Delay): This should be as close to zero as possible and really needs to be under 10 milliseconds.

Packet Loss: This needs to be under 0.5%.

Troubleshooting Choppy Or Distorted Audio & Audio Delay

This is almost always caused by poor network stability or inadequate bandwidth. You should contact your ISP if your latency, jitter or packet loss standards are not being maintained. Otherwise, you may need to purchase more bandwidth. You should also make sure that you don't have any users hogging up the network's throughput with large FTP transactions, Torrent downloads, etc. Also, try using a different network cable and try connecting from a different workstation to see if it is something particular to the problem workstation's network connection.

Troubleshooting Audio Static

This is typically caused by the physical connection including loose or bad cabling, a malfunctioning phone or possibly electromagnetic interference. Try different cabling. Check to see if the same thing is happening at that workstation with a different phone that is known to work. And try the phone at a different workstation to isolate if this is being caused by electromagnetic interference or another network issue at the problem workstation.

Troubleshooting One-Way Audio

One-Way Audio happens when the voice data leaves a client's EdgeWater and then gets lost somewhere on the internet beyond our control. In order to troubleshoot this, we have to run PCAPs (packet captures) while replicating the problem. We can then do the time consuming task of going through those PCAPs trying to find out where on the internet that this data is getting lost. For example, maybe it got lost while on Century Link's or Comcast's part of the internet. We can then show the documentation to that network provider so that they can fix their "leak" of network traffic.