Sound Cuts Out for Half a Second Randomly

[cp24isgoodnews]

Yesterday I installed PingPlotter utility and ran the test to viop.freephoneline.ca. There is a packet loss up to 60% on Hop 7 which is gw-295ca.torontointernetexchange.net every 1-1.5 minutes (red bars on the second from the bottom graph)

Thanks for sharing - it's appearing that packet loss on the network routing between many ISPs and us is definitely what's causing this. I am having our network admin review this so we can hopefully find a speedy solution.

If anyone else wants to share pingplotter results, more information can only help

Steve you say that at home you seem to have no issues at all, could you see how your traffic is being routed via ping plotter as maybe this will help as well to determine how to resolve this issue or better yet maybe users who don't have an issue can post what working results look like as maybe they are being routed differently depending where they are......so far my brain is puzzled, although Steve if you need any help testing things let me know or any of us for that matter

[FONGO_steve]

My connection at home is with freephoneline dsl, so the only hop I take after my external IP is to our host.

If anyone does have any tests to show me from a working setup, that would also be great. CP24isgoodnews does have a great idea about comparing some working vs. problematic connections to see what the different routes are and what sort of packet loss is occurring along the way (if any).

[OverDrive]

Here is the image

this is the image

Attached is the pingplotter data as well.

This was taken when no one was home, I was remote connected into my machine using logmein, and my other systems were not downloading anything consistantly. I had full bandwidth available. To add to this, I do not do any QoS on my router.

Also, to keep everything in 1 thread and not in PM, My setup is


Router

WRT54GL
Firmware: DD-WRT v24-sp1 (07/27/08) std (yea, gotta update that, probably over the xmas holidays.)

ATA

Product Name: SPA-3102
Software Version: 5.1.7(GW)
Hardware Version: 1.4.5(a)

ISP
Cogeco

Modem
Thompson (Information found from my modem's diagnostic page as i'm not physically there right now)

Status Code: Operational
Software Version: ST52.05.45
Software Model: a806
Bootloader: 2.1.6d


Using DHCP

The first few were from me just pinging without being on the phone. then about a quarter of the way through I called my answering machine at home and started listening to the prompts. I noticed the drop outs were not as frequent but were still there. I spent a good 10 min on the phone just listening over and over to my prompts.

Perhaps i can give the admin access to my voicemail device so that they can call and test it (cause it always answers as I don't use the voicemail that FPL provides)

[brentw]

Thrree paths attached.
All 3 have the dropout issue.
I don't have access right now to that DSL which is 4th connection I tested on.

Fibre

Fibre connection in Toronto

Cogeco

Cogeco connection in Niagara

cont'd in next post (3 attachments max it looks like)

[brentw]

cont'd from above

Rogers

Rogers Connection in Markham

And this is the debug log from my pap2 on the Rogers connection.
There were a few blips right near the end.
No entries in the debug log that corresponded with the blips at all.

And the blips did not correspond with any of the red marks/packet drops in the Rogers pingplotter capture above, I was watching very closely for that.

PAP2 debug log on Rogers Connection

[Red89GT]

mine:

[cp24isgoodnews]

At this point a lot of people seem to be having the issue of the hop on IP:38.20.41.70 at least thats what im seeing from the people who are commenting and posting pictures and from the few locations. From the two from bell I have tried and the other three on rogers it all seems to indicate that the IP in question is causing those apparent issues, for most people its the second or third last hop that causing issues, now the only question in theory left is why is the hop causing issues?.......unfortunately this is something i do not have the answer for

[laurent]

A quick review of the available pingplotter charts posted here seems to indicate that the problem only occurs for the users who peer through TORIX, but from different gateways. It seems the point to observe would be between FPL's servers and the popular torix isp's gateways (such as packetflow for example).

PS It's important to leave Ping Plotter running for a long time to gather useful data. Since the problem only seems to happen every 1 to 2 minutes, we're looking at a pattern spikes in the ping charts, not just packet losses.

Why? Well a sudden jitter (change in speed of delivery) would cause a momentary pause in speech. While not a packet loss, this would not be noted as a problem from the perspective of the ATA device (no packet loss = no problem) but still annoying to the user (delay = cut).

So please leave your pingplotters for a long time before pasting the results. One hour seems ideal.

Here's a short one from work (I have to leave now)

voip.freephoneline.ca.png (5.88 KiB) Viewed 26578 times

[OverDrive]

Attached is another set of pings - this started when I was on the phone helping a referral who bought their ATA from FPL and is very close to cancelling because of this issue.

I've told her to email off her own pingplotter graphs to your support team to help.


Well, After I just left it running, and Just got home now, so this is data from about 3 hours of pings.

The other attachment is all of the data from the program to examine the rest of the data.


I concur with laurent with regards to the people who are routed through Torix. Both my friend who I referred and myself are on cogeco who peers with Torix. Unfortunately I dont know of anyone who I can test who doesn't peer with Torix through their ISP.

[laurent]

Here's 3 hours of it, didn't seem to have much problems.

[brentw]

I don't think it's related to Torix.
On my main Rogers line at home I come in through Cogentco in the States and it's quite bad, if not worse than the connections that I've tested on coming through Torix.

And I don't think it's related to traffic that we can see on our end.
The different tests I have done nothing spikes in the slightest and I still get the half second audio dropouts.

I have tested with pingplotter running and calling into voicemail, I watch pingplotter for when a dropout occurs and a few seconds after just to be sure it's not a bit delayed in reporting, and there is nothing noticeable.

[Red89GT]

another one

[charlau]

Here's mine:

[dan68]

same here

PAP2T-NA(firmware 5.1.6(LS))
router ASUS RT-N16
ISP Videotron
Montreal

[Bob]

Yesterday I installed PingPlotter utility and ran the test to viop.freephoneline.ca. There is a packet loss up to 60% on Hop 7 which is gw-295ca.torontointernetexchange.net every 1-1.5 minutes (red bars on the second from the bottom graph)

Thanks for sharing - it's appearing that packet loss on the network routing between many ISPs and us is definitely what's causing this. I am having our network admin review this so we can hopefully find a speedy solution.

If anyone else wants to share pingplotter results, more information can only help

Hi steve,
I don't have pingplotter pro, so thereisn't really anything interesting to share, besides the fact, that I observe huge spiking of ping by address 69.90.218.54 which is one hop from freephoneline. While my ping to freephoneline is stable and well below 30 ms, the ping to this address is spiking up to 200+ , and it's not just "single incidents". I put pinging to 1 second interval and I observe _5_ consequtive pings of 180+.

Update: get free version of pingplotter. Here is what I'm talking about:

voip.PNG (6.22 KiB) Viewed 26537 times

[cp24isgoodnews]

Hey Steve,

Another thing i noticed lately is that the issue it self doesn't happen frequently as much at different times of the day, making calls in the evening seems to have less packet drops as opposed to a weekday mid-noon calls seem to have more drops, maybe the server that is dropping the packets is doing this because it is bottle necking and 295.ca is not on the highest priority list and hence the packet drops to alleviate its network load to high priority packets , its just a hunch but its in the right direction to trying to solve the issue, what have your network administrators said to you Steve? Have they been able to replicate the issue ?

[brentw]

I noticed the same thing.
On the phone around 8am and it doesn't happen very often.
Getting into 10am or so and it starts getting worse.
And when I do some tests at 2am it's not very often again.

[leoasil]

My ping plotter graph seems very stable.

[magicray]

I've been having the same problem (getting cut off half second or lost packets as its indicated on my pap2t). I start getting this issue in Septemeber/October but didn't think much of it. It's become seriously annoying I tested my setup with pingplotter pro there doens't seem to be any problems but i'm still getting half second cutoff, just like the sample mp3 in the thread.

Tried many setup changes to pinpoint the problem before coming to freephoneline.ca forum but no luck. I tried just connecting my Teksavvy line or just my acanac line but the same problem and no luck.

My Setup -
2 DSL Lines - with Tomato MLPPP
1 - Teksavvy
2 - Acanac
connected to PAP2T

[leoasil]

problem is pretty bad right now (8:40PM EST Sunday) if anyone wants to test it.


Packet loss is over 700 now. (8:48PM)

For troubleshooting testing purposes, I used the same device on Line 2 to another SIP provider at the same time. No packet loss.

[cp24isgoodnews]

problem is pretty bad right now (8:40PM EST Sunday) if anyone wants to test it.


Packet loss is over 700 now. (8:48PM)

For troubleshooting testing purposes, I used the same device on Line 2 to another SIP provider at the same time. No packet loss.

The amount of packet loss you are seeing is about normal for that time of day, but try it during the day and you will see that it is quite worse around 11am to about 3pm if your willing to do the testing but the comparison for calling on another provider on line 2 shows you that clearly there is an issue as packets are being handled by provider 2 are being directed properly

[mitwtim]

It is encouraging to see so many people are taking the effort to sign up for the forum and report details about this error, and that a resolution is being sought. I posted several weeks ago about this issue and I can say it has not gotten any better at all. Constantly being asked to repeat words and if we want to get our call waiting beep is incredibly frustrating. Our home phone is basically unusable now and we have reverted to using our cell phones. I have read a lot of very detailed posts by users, it really seems like it is an issue with the server or all of our accounts. What is the consensus are we getting close to a solution? My wife is on me to change back to Rogers Home Phone which will require signing up for a contract. It was November 3rd when I first posted about this, and that was after waiting at least a day or two hoping it was just some fluke like had happened when the MWI indicator didn't work for an entire weekend. I really had high hopes for this service and had been referred by several people who said it was great. It really seems like as soon as we switched it all went down hill. Unless a solution is going to be reached in next couple of days I am going to have to give in, it has been more than a month at this point. What does everyone think, is a solution near? I really am hoping that this can be fixed and I can enjoy the service that I heard so much about!

If the problems get worse during the core business day could it be that the resources on the server can't support the influx of businesses that come online at that point? Just a shot in the dark, since I assume you also support businesses and not just home users. But, I can say that I have the issues at all times of the day and honestly I haven't noticed it being worse at a particular time.

[Jake]

As a suggestion for a different kind of test. When you are getting the dropped sound, try the call again with the FPL soft phone and see it is still happens. If it does this would completely lop out the ATA as being the problem. I know it is not the most convenient to do this, but then neither is missing bits of calls.

[charlau]

Here's another one, not from the link I'm using for the phone, but from work (fiber 10Mb). This one is flawless, much different than from home!

[ninja]

after configuring QOS on my dir-655 I don't have sound cuts out anymore. The only time it happen now is when I'm put on hold listening to automation.