[Asterisk-Users] IVR Menu and VoiceMail quality

[Chris Shaw]

I have really tried to do my best googling and wiki-reading before asking
this question. I couldn't find the answers there so I throw myself at the
mercy of the list...

I get excellent quality for SIP -> PSTN and PSTN -> SIP calls, however when
I or anyone else calls from PSTN -> * the voice menus are oftentimes very
choppy. Sometimes they are absolutely perfect and I cannot tell that it's
actually VoIP. Sometimes it's so bad that I can't understand what Allison's
saying at all... Calls on the same network sound just fine... I know what
you're thinking, it's a congested link, and that may be but I've noticed
that if I play with the nice value of asterisk, it seems to help. Setting
nice to 0 seems to work the best, I tried -20 and it was the worst...

I have implemented QoS on my network and have given any and all asterisk
packets priority. As I said actual calls are crystal clear so I believe it
to be a problem with Asterisk itself or the machine it's running on.
Possibly some bottleneck somewhere. I realize that since it's going over the
public internet, the occasional dropped packet is to be expected, but what's
frusterating is that I can get crystal clear menus sometimes even when my
network is fully loaded and other times when it's perfectly quiet it sounds
absolutely horrible...

Here are the machine's specs if that helps:

AMD Athlon 1Ghz (Old Thunderbird core)
Asus A7V600
128MB DDR-266 RAM
450GB storage (4 IDE drives in an LVM array) *grin*
Pure VoIP, no digium hardware

Internet connection is cable with 3Mbit downlink and 256Kbit uplink...

As I said earlier I wouldn't have even asked, but it dosen't seem to be
totally bandwidth related so I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas...

Chris Shaw
IS Manager
Water Tech Industries
Phone: (888)-254-8412
Fax: (503)-261-9118
E-Mail: chriss at watertech.com