[Asterisk-Users] VoIP Provider problems

[Johnathan Corgan]

Robert Terzi wrote:

> The best tool I've found for monitoring connections, routes, congestion,
> is called PingPlotter.  http://pingplotter.com/   It's a shareware 
> visual traceroute.  It continually graphs the traceroute style
> responses.  There is a scrollable timeline to view how things change.
> You can get raw data out of it as well.  It records changes in routes.

Thanks for the excellent link.  I've had Asterisk on a home network and 
Broadvoice for a couple weeks now.  IAX2 calls between Firefly 
soft-phone on my desk and other soft phones directly on the net have 
worked fairly well, but reported voice quality when going out over 
broadvoice to the PSTN has really stunk, making it only marginally useful.

So I've downloaded this utility and am now tracing out 
sip.broadvoice.com, using UDP (as my ISP filters icmp.) Actually, the 
trace doesn't get past broadvoice's edge router, so I replaced the final 
IP address with that of the edge router itself so I could see the data 
instead of destination unreachable.

Anyway, with only 20 minutes I've data I'm seeing some rather 
disappointing results.

First off, I have Sprint Broadband Direct internet service, a fixed 
wireless setup with a 2-5 Mbps downlink and a terrible 128 kbps uplink. 
So I know I'm in for trouble anyway.

First hop off my home lan over the wireless starts at about 9% packet 
loss.  Sucks but for normal TCP based stuff (email, web, ssh, etc.) life 
goes on but just a little slower.

The broadvoice edge router (63.251.209.126, their lax site) is another 
11 hops away. One hop before that, the packet loss rate has gone up to 
13%, so the Internet adds another 4% to my sucky ISP connection. Round 
trip time to this point is 200ms, so-so but livable.

Here's the kicker:

Reported packet loss from broadvoice, one additional hop, is a whopping 
29%.  So between the last "Internet" router (bbnet2.lax.pnap.net) and 
broadvoice's edge router, there is an additional 16% loss.

No wonder my outgoing voice to the PSTN is choppy, filled with several 
second gaps, and makes people laugh at me for spending $20 a month on 
VOIP.  I admit I can help things a bit by getting an ADSL or SDSL link 
with a better provisioned uplink, but even if I had 0% loss to 
broadvoice, their own net connection seems seriously under-provisioned.

One thing might be affecting this and make these numbers 
suspect--broadvoice might have QoS on the edge router such that non-RTP 
packets get lower-class status, so my UDP pings are artificially dropped 
in favor of real RTP traffic (actually, I'd be doing this if I were 
them.)  Anyone care to comment on how realistic a test this is?

I'll do these tests for a few hours and hit the different broadvoice 
proxy networks and see if there is a difference, and compare to loss 
rates for other sites over my ISP uplink.

Anyway, my Digium 11b card comes in tomorrow, so I'll be off to more fun 
setting up the IVR and voicemail, etc., for my home line off the 
PSTN...love this Asterisk thing.

-Johnathan