[Asterisk-Users] VoIP Provider problems

[Rich Adamson]

> No, I'm not ignorant of how this works. You'll notice I put it
> "appears" bad when I posted my results. Yes, it's not a perfect way to
> show problems -- but taken with a grain of salt it's not half bad.
> Especially when sampled over a longer period of time, and if the
> original poster can correlate the PingPlotter results to the quality
> of his calls.
> 
> Now if he shows 30% loss during good and bad calls, that's another story.
> 
> I posted my results to help the original poster. If he's trying to
> troubleshoot an apparent bad connection with Sprint, he needs all the
> help he can get. If they can proove the connection works even the
> littlest bit, they'll say it's fine and blame Broadvoice.
> 
> If everyone gets similar levels of loss at those points, one could
> conclude its a side effect of the routers having better things to do.
> But if he's the only one showing them, then it would be a starting
> point to conclude something is wrong with his connection or something
> along Sprint's backbone.

I'm not the original poster either, but for those following this thread
keep in mind that a fair number of isp's use an upper-layer device to
throttle data flows to some predeteremined rate. For example, I know
some cable broadband companies that throttle their users to 128k up
and some other value down. Don't have a clue whether their throttling
box drops packets, delays them, or what; however, considering they
would want to handle both udp and tcp, I'd have to bet some amount
they drop udp packets to throttle udp data flows.

On the other hand, I know of several dsl broadband companies that don't
pay any attention to their uplink congestion, letting their uplink 
routers drop packets, etc. Since they can't afford to chase uplink
utilizations by augmenting bandwidth, dropped packets happen 
frequently. Nature of the beast for some.