Has anyone tried increasing internet speed to fix problems?

corvette dave · Post by **corvette dave** » Mon Mar 16, 2009 11:19 pm

I increased the speed on my internet connection 2 weeks ago and mj has worked fine ever since. I was having so many problems that mj had become unusable. Made the speed increase and instantly mj worked.
I posted this a week ago and got a pretty cold reception:

http://www.phoneservicesupport.com/mayb ... t5142.html

Has anyone tried it?

snowbug · Post by **snowbug** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 11:36 am

I think for the most part, increasing the Internet speed involves lots of work and it's hard to downgrade it if it doesn't fix the problem. In other words, it's not easy to try.

For me, I'm on DSL right now, switching to Cable for a faster speed is much more involved and won't be easy to switch it back. Not to mention that the MJ worked just fine before with the same connection.

That said, I am curious to hear if anyone else has tried this and what the outcome is?

corvette dave · Post by **corvette dave** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 5:40 pm

snowbug wrote:I think for the most part, increasing the Internet speed involves lots of work and it's hard to downgrade it if it doesn't fix the problem. In other words, it's not easy to try.

For me, I'm on DSL right now, switching to Cable for a faster speed is much more involved and won't be easy to switch it back. Not to mention that the MJ worked just fine before with the same connection.

That said, I am curious to hear if anyone else has tried this and what the outcome is?

Very easy for me. I just called the cable company and told them to increase the speed. They told me the price, I agreed to it and they made the switch right then. Took all of 5 minutes. I started making calls again a few minutes after that. I couldn't use mj at all before that.
I can switch back to my original speed at any time. I have the added benefit of having faster internet speed which I use a lot.
Thanks for the input.
Still hoping for someone to try this.

mberlant · Post by **mberlant** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 7:11 pm

Unless the cable company is playing tricks with you, there is no magic involved here. MJ requires 80kbps in each direction for each simultaneous conversation. If you are not receiving that much from your ISP or if other devices on your LAN or other programs in your hosting PC are depriving MJ of that much bandwidth, call quality will suffer. You then have a choice -- raise the bridge or lower the river.

Many people implement QoS to ensure that the MJ has priority on the slice of bandwidth it needs. Many other people rearrange the priorities of the hosting PC to give higher priority to the MJ process. For some people, these solutions are not viable, so they must subscribe to more total bandwidth in order to assure that MJ gets enough.

There's nothing wrong with this approach; it's just not Plan A in most people's solution set.

hsweiss · Post by **hsweiss** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 3:34 pm

You may now have been provisioned onto a different piece of equipment - the old one may have had "issues" supporting VOIP (e.g., excessive jitter). Unless you have something else that is sucking down your bandwidth, simply increasing the speed should not have done squat. When I was in Germany I ran MJ over a 100Kbps internet connection without any problems. At home on FiOS it worked the same over my original 5M down/2M up as it does now on my 10M down/2M up. The only other thing I can think of is that you have "bad" neighbors on your cable connection (you share your avail bandwidth with your neighbors on cable) and they were sucking down all the bandwidth?

sequimmj · Post by **sequimmj** » Thu Mar 26, 2009 11:36 pm

I live in Washington state and have an MJ, so I sent one to my son in Australia. We tried chatting but it was impossible - I would only hear bits and pieces of his words. He contacted his ISP and moved up to a faster speed plan and now it works like a charm. It sounds like he's right across town, and the only problem we've noted now is that the MJ apparently "times out" after about an hour. A very minor annoyance, considering the monetary savings.

StrobeWylan · Post by **StrobeWylan** » Mon Mar 30, 2009 3:22 pm

I get my internet via a wireless 'radio' and have had a lot of distortion issues with MJ. Using wireshark I always find packets out of sequence when there is distortion and when I test for speed on speakeasy the speed is down to about half what it should be. took my MJ to a friends place who has cable, at a slower speed than mine, and had the best phone calls since I use MJ. So I think speed issues can be a symptom of something else. When I push my ISP techs to fix their problem [they're getting tired of me] I get better phone calling for about a month. My contract ends next month and I will be leaving them.

Lord Qouros · Post by **Lord Qouros** » Thu Apr 16, 2009 8:36 pm

I think alot of it is also the internet company... I have comcast 16/2.5 When I had the triple play I had my torrents downloading at max but since I dropped all but internet I have to limit my torrents to no more than 300/150 inorder for the mj to woork good... I am thinking that they slow things down so that you get everything through them.

tony · Post by **tony** » Thu Apr 16, 2009 9:53 pm

mberlant wrote:Unless the cable company is playing tricks with you, there is no magic involved here. MJ requires 80kbps in each direction for each simultaneous conversation.

I've had similar experience that the quality of MJ calls improved drastically when our local cable internet company increased the speed by 50% on their basic cable subscription. Before the increase I had pretty good speed and way, way in excess of what was needed for MJ. Still my MOS scores were only in the mid to high 3's and the MJ was marginal on calls. After the 50% speed increase, on speed tests I'm getting download speeds in excess of 15 Mbps and upload > 450 kbps. My MJ calls are land line-like. I'd say 90-95% of the calls are of this quality, there's the odd call that's all broken up but I just call back. My MOS scores are consistently 4.0 now. Maybe it's a coincidence that call quality improved. But maybe the higher speeds came with new equipment that also meant less congestion through my ISP? Works for me. I don't bother doing a test call anymore to Home Depot's automated answering service to check call quality before making a call, I just dial the destination.

The only problem that remains is the lag when the person answers before they hear me. They'll say "hello" a few times and I only hear them on their 2nd or 3rd "hello", if they haven't already hung up on me. The lag is 2-3 seconds. But for some odd reason, once we start talking, it's in real time and neither of us notice a lag.

mberlant · Post by **mberlant** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 1:23 am

My guess is that you were offered higher end user speeds on the heels of a major infrastructure upgrade, since your drop speed was already significantly more than you needed for a VoIP conversation.

tony · Post by **tony** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 1:39 am

mberlant wrote:My guess is that you were offered higher end user speeds on the heels of a major infrastructure upgrade,

Yes, and on top of the at-no-extra cost 50 % increase in speed, Shaw added a momentary speed boost feature where the first 10 seconds of download happens at even faster download speeds. Nice.