Voice Quality during Internet use and CID

[severly]

Im fairly new to MJ and just found this awesome board so I'm hoping that the collective wisdom of the forum can point me in the right direction. I think that I've gotten my situation down to two last problems.

1. CID not showing up on my handset. - I've read the 100K resister solution and will be making a trip to Radio Shack today. I have every reason to believe that this will solve my issue as several others that have Uniden phones have gotten them to work. I'll be sure to report my findings, as I'm certain all of you will not be able to sleep until you find out It would be nice to have the name displayed as well, but the idea of getting a handset that holds a directory would solve that as well.

2. Choppy Audio during internet use I live in Danville VA and have been fairly pleased with the quality of the audio, a little soft on the volume but nothing worth going back to the phone company for. The problem I run into is when I or my wife are on the phone and we are downloading or streaming video on the internet. I went to myspeed and ran my tests. Here are the results while only running the test.

Download speed 954 Kbps
Upload speed 366 Kbps
Quality of service 98%
Max Delay 48 ms
Round trip time 54 ms
Upstream jitter 4.1 ms
Upstream packet loss 0%
Upstream packet order 100%
Upsteam discards 0%
Downstream jitter 3.5 ms
Downstream packet loss 0%
Downstream packet order 100%
Downstream discards 0%

So green lights across the board. This is more than likely why I have a really good connection while I'm not doing anything with the internet. I then reran the test while signed on to Youtube and streamed the highlights of Superbowl XLIII (GO STEELERS!!) and receieved these results.


Download speed 406 Kbps
Upload speed 316 Kbps
Quality of service 39%
Max Delay 527 ms
Round trip time 57 ms
Upstream jitter 0.6 ms
Upstream packet loss 0%
Upstream packet order 100%
Upsteam discards 0%
Downstream jitter 135.4 ms
Downstream packet loss 0%
Downstream packet order 100%
Downstream discards 0%

I have red lights on the Max Delay and Downstream jitter and a yellow light on the Quality of Service. So that would seem to be consistant with what I am experiencing in the 3 Dimentional world in which we live and breathe.

Ideally I would like to be able to dedicate a certain amount of bandwidth to MJ and then allow Internet Explorer to work with whatever is left. I don't mind if the downloads are a little slower if our VoIP is solid. I found a little add-on from uselessapplications.com called IE Throttle that you can use to set the max bandwidth for IE. You would think that this would be exactly what I needed, but it didn't seem to have any affect. My call to the echo test seemed about the same and the download speed of the videos seemed about the same as well. It seems like that add-on is useless..........oh wait, I guess that explains the name of the website.

I've read an awful lot about setting QoS and such, but, and please don't make too much fun of me, I'm not using a router. I only have one computer. My cable connection is plugged into a Abit U10C018.80 cable modem with an ethernet cable connecting the modem to my PC. I know this causes some to be concerned about a security risk, maybe I have too much faith in the firewalls of Windows and my McAfee Security Suite. The MJ is plugged into one of my USB ports (yes I've tried them all) and then I have a splitter plugged into the MJ. The phone on my PC desk is plugged into the splitter and then I have a line running from the splitter to the wall jack that backfeeds through the housewiring to my other phonejacks. I have the main line coming into the house disconnected. All of my phone works in the house and once I try the resistor I hope to have CID on them as well.

I'm running a Q6600 Processor Dual Core-Quad with 2GB of RAM and Vista Home Premium. I was looking into getting a powered hub, but that seems like it would only solve the CID problem and if I can solve that with a 99 cent resistor than again I am sticking it to the man.

I did try the TCP Optimizer that was suggested in other post, but I didn't see much affect positive or negative.

I appreciate any suggestions that can be offered and if you feel the need to mock my security risks please keep your profanity to a minimum. After all, there are kids here Thank you in advance

[az2008]

2. Choppy Audio during internet use

Did you read the wiki FAQ entry on choppy/garbled voice?

Mark

[severly]

Yeah, I took a look at it. I don't think my CPU is an issue, fairly certain I'm looking at a bandwidth issue. That is why I'm interested in know if there is a way I can set aside bandwidth for my VoIP applications and allow the other processes to use whatever is left.

This might just turn into something like knowing that you can't be in the shower while someone flushes the toilet. I'm just hoping I could get something simple to resolve it.

[Boondocs]

I ran into the same problems when my daughter is using youtube. It's not a upload problem for me it was a download problem. I used this program http://www.netlimiter.com/ and just limited her bandwidth. In your case maybe you should not steam/download anything while on the phone cause of your connection.

[az2008]

That is why I'm interested in know if there is a way I can set aside bandwidth for my VoIP applications and allow the other processes to use whatever is left.

It's not clear if you really followed it or just had a look at it. It says to provide the link to the line-quality test, not post the summary. You posted the summary. It says to change the priority, but you say you're sure it's not a CPU problem (not that you tried it). And, it has other suggestions which it's not clear you investigated (change proxy?).

The wiki FAQ (and how-to) gives you everything you need to know to diagnose the problem. If you want to reserve bandwidth for VOIP, it gives you the available options to do so.

Mark

[az2008]

I ran into the same problems when my daughter is using youtube. It's not a upload problem for me it was a download problem. I used this program http://www.netlimiter.com/ and just limited her bandwidth. In your case maybe you should not steam/download anything while on the phone cause of your connection.

I wasn't aware of that option. I'll add it to the QoS how-to.

Mark

[Boondocs]

i just installed it yesterday and so far it seems to be working well.

[severly]

Ok, I consider myself official busted. I did in fact "look at" the wiki FAQ, at least the page that I believe to be what you are referring to az, I didn't see anything about linking to my results as opposed to providing a summary. I did link to the how to on discovering and changing proxies, so I'll have to give that a try when i have some time.

I'll keep you updated. As far as using Netlimiter, I did look into that, but I'm hoping to find something I don't have to pay for. After all, I'm looking to make something NOT work as well as it could, so I'm not wanting to pay for that.

[az2008]

Ok, I consider myself official busted. I did in fact "look at" the wiki FAQ,

The FAQ has an entry for choppy/garbled voice. It links to a how-to for diagnosing it. It's very methodical. It could save you money. It tells how to determine whether you would benefit from QoS. I.e., if QoS wouldn't benefit you, you'd save money by following the diagnostic to find out before investing in NetLimiter, Hawking Broadband Booster, or a router to flash with Tomato.

The problem is, you've stated two conflicting priorities. You're looking for something easy, and without paying money. That's not reasonable. You can put in effort following the how-to (and save money). Or, you can start spending money to see what helps, without putting in the effort.

Mark

[severly]

I feel slapped on the wrist

[severly]

Just as an update, I installed the 100K resistor and lo and behold I now have CID on my handset. Haven't have the time to try the proxy settings yet but I will as soon as I can.

I did try the trial version of netlimiter and it did work, but it seemed like I couldn't adjust how much I throttled IE. If I enabled limits it would be to 5KBPS and my call was very clear, but that really pulled my internet lower than I needed. Netlimiter also had tons of other features that I didn't really need, sort of like buying a corvette to drive to the end of my driveway and pick up my mail. Hopefully I'll come acrossed a simple app that will give me the ability to do what I want.

[mberlant]

Since you have only one PC connected directly to your cable modem, all of the contention you describe must be inside that PC. This indicates that SJPhone (MJ) is having difficulty getting enough CPU cycles (or RAM space) from your PC to be able to operate efficiently.

Moreover, the very nature of running a speed test from this single computer clouds the measurements that the speed test reports. Regardless of this, as you have certainly read in other postings here, MJ requires only 80kbps in each direction for each simultaneous phone call. You seem to have plenty of bandwidth available, so this also points back to the horsepower in your PC.

A dual core quad PC with 2GB of RAM should be plenty powerful to drive the MJ. Vista Home Premium, though, could be wanting to suck up all of this resource, and more. Do you have access to a PC that runs XP? If you do, I would recommend testing MJ on an XP machine in your home. You may find that upgrading from Vista to XP might just be the ticket to making MJ work more reliably.

[Boondocs]

I did try the trial version of netlimiter and it did work, but it seemed like I couldn't adjust how much I throttled IE. If I enabled limits it would be to 5KBPS and my call was very clear, but that really pulled my internet lower than I needed. Netlimiter also had tons of other features that I didn't really need, sort of like buying a corvette to drive to the end of my driveway and pick up my mail. Hopefully I'll come acrossed a simple app that will give me the ability to do what I want.

Just click on the number for upload and download and you can set it to whatever you would like. I limited my laptop to 1meg download which works fine for me. Also you can set for certain program to use limited bandwidth. I would leave MJ open(no restrictions) and limit your IE to 500k. You might need to play around with the numbers using a speedtest.