[asterisk-users] Tired of dropouts and garbled phone calls - where to go next?

[Patrick Lists]

On 10/28/2013 07:29 PM, Eddie Mikell wrote:
> All,
>
> The users in our organization are well, quite frankly, sick of phone
> service that is being provided.  The choppy phone calls, and drop outs
> are detrimental to our sales force.
>
> I've tried about everything I can think of.
>
>     Moved the asterisk server from VM machine to dedicated machine

That's a good start. Now what have you done to conclude that the 
Asterisk server is not the cause of your problems?

>     More than enough bandwidth

That's irrelevant. It's about the quality of that bandwidth. Have you 
figured out if there might be a lot of packetloss or are you perhaps on 
a cablelink which is a *shared* medium? Once your link hits the box in 
the street it shares it with others who might be eating up all the 
bandwidth with their torrent downloads etc.? Use tools like iperf, smoke 
ping and mtr to see if there are obvious problems on the route to your 
VoIP provider.

>     Setting 802.1p = 7
>
>     Set Dedicated voice traffic 35% of bandwidth.
>
> Not sure what option would be the best

Once the packets leave your premises and your ISP/cable company starts 
messing with them a QoS setting is generally not honored so not very 
helpful unless your LAN is congested.

>     Put analog lines in the conference room to avoid the dropouts -
>     leave the sip lines in place for day to day use

If those analog lines are cheap, easy to get then as an intermediate 
solution I would order those analog lines as fast as I could. Or fix the 
VoIP problems, whichever is faster.

>     Hire a consultant

An experienced VoIP consultant should be able to tell you what is or 
could be causing your problems. With your users "sick of phone service" 
it suprises me that you haven't already hired one.

>     Ditch the system and buy a pre-packaged system - RingCentral or some
>     such.

And what if it's your Internet link or the route to your VoIP provider? 
What if your VoIP provider is messing up?

> There are no local asterisk professionals who can help, and we are a
> little leery of opening up our system to outside consultants.

If you don't want that then you don't want that but given the state your 
users are in I would be less worried about giving a Consultant access to 
the Asterisk box and more worried about my job :-)

> Anyone else face the above, and finally abandoned Asterisk for a
> commercial system?

I have seen that once years ago where some clueless sales guy had 
totally oversold an ancient Asterisk/Bristuff/ISDN setup which was very 
buggy and crash prone. There was no way to make that work reliably. 
After the supplier failed for months I was brought in to review the 
setup and possibly fix it. Told the customer to cut its losses. So they 
kicked out their supplier and opted for a different setup.

> We have 167 users.
> I use Grandstream GXP 2100 on the desktop and Polycom ip6000 for the
> conference rooms.

I don't know how Grandstream is these days. I thought the GXP2100 was ok 
but I guess you already know if there's a problem with those phones from 
the (lack of) intra-office call complaints from your users.

> Suggestions welcome.

Hire a Consultant or someone who has been part of this Community for a 
while and is well known on this list or in #asterisk on irc. Provide 
remote access if required. Change passwords afterwards.

If you really don't want to provide remote access then find a reputable 
VoIP provider with a switch physically as close as possible to your 
location, get a DID for a few bucks, hook it up to your Asterisk box and 
route it to a line on your phone, grab your cell, call that DID and see 
if you still have the problem. It wouldn't be the first time that the 
link between you and your VoIP provider just doesn't cut it. Or maybe 
your VoIP provider just sucks and you need to change to a different one. 
Both flowroute.com and voip.ms work well for me (no affiliation). Or 
maybe your Internet link sucks and you need to change your ISP.

Good luck.

Regards,
Patrick