Signal breaking up using Rogers Rockethub

[victor1242]

I am using the Rogers Rockethub ( wireless router - not DSL). Apparently due to delays in packet traffic (jitter/latency) voice communication tends to break up. It is worst for the person on the other end of the call. I get some break up, but it is still understandable.

Does anyone have freephone running okay with either a Bell or Rogers wireless hub router? Any suggestions for me to explore?

[FONGO_steve]

To be honest, you're one of the first people I've heard of using a wireless-based internet solution who has VOIP actually working. The internet is littered with people who have tried using 3G and WiMax internet solutions with VOIP and never had any luck.

You are correct though, the latency and jitter on wireless internet solutions is generally too high to have any sort of success with VOIP. This will vary depending on your signal strength though - you might be close to a tower and have an alright experience, where as someone a couple blocks away may have no luck at all due to the signal strength drop.

Let's see if anyone else who's done this may have some input on anything they've done to maybe have better luck.

[tigerking]

Victor1242,

Good to hear that VoIP finally work on wireless network.

I was using VoIP on Bell Unplug (the equivalent on Rogers was Rogers Unplug) that is using the WiMax technology with cell network to provide internet services as a transition technology before they get the HSPA on board.

In that time, they blocked all the RTP channels to ban VoIP on wireless as the technology is sharing same up link channel on data side. The model of internet access is asymmetric and DL bandwidth is higher than UL bandwidth. With WiMax technology, it was decided to share the same uplink among many users and therefore not affortable to support RTP uplink for multiple users on the data uplink channel.

The result was, you can hookup the ATA, SIP signal OK and you can register your ATA BUT when you make call, no sound at all, RTP was killed.

To solve the problem, I use OpenVPN and setup a VPN tunnel to shield out the VoIP packet and than I can make calls but the quality was really depending on how many users in your vincinity surfing internet!).

With HSPA or 3G+, they can provide higher uplink and down link bandwidth (7, 21 Mbps downlink, 5 Mbps uplink). With this technology, their voice traffic (for cell phone of course) have higher priority then data (best effort). If the voice traffic in a cell site hit the capacity (most of the case with the initial infrastructure for now) your VoIP call via data channel will be screwed and therefore you encountered large jitter and broken calls.

For most of the cell sites, they are still leveraging the legacy infrastructure to provide backhaul from cell site to mobile node on T1's (1.5mbps/T1) and you can imagine 10Mbps to 45 Mbps per cell sites is already a lot of bandwidth. It will take time for the network to evolve to fully Ethernet infrastructure between cell site and mobile node and by that time you may have 100 Mbps or even higher. The speed the mobility carriers quoted in the ads is about the HSPA up and down link speeds and not the real throughput when you experience the internet surfing.

It just like that in you home network, every connection between your router and your home computers is claimed 100 Mbps Ethernet Connection but you can only have 3Mbps download and 0.5Mbps upload on your DSL internet modem. Your throughput is still 3Mbps max!

Anyhow, good to hear that is improving and now you can run VoIP over mobility data network. However, it will take few more evolution say to LTE to get a full tripple play (multimedia support with right quality of services) solution for mobility access.

Final comment is using the Rockethub is quite expensive as you pay $35 for 5G ($7/G) there after you will pay $2 per MB!! For cable modem or DSL you pay $45 for 60G ($0.75/G).

Hope this explain your situation.

[victor1242]

Thank you for your details on the wireless environment. Because I live out in a rural area, dsl is nor available since we do not have cable option and our land lines are not upgradeable. I pay $35 for 3gb. Where does your pricing come from?

As I explained the voip from our location is not good enough to give up our landline, since the service goes from good to unusable. I have done route checking and find that while my voip (voip.freephoneline.ca) is in Kitchener, there are many hops which include Atlanta and Washington as well as Toronto before getting to the destination. I don't know if there is a method of reducing the intermediate hops, but it appears that the latency is due to this.

Do you have any ideas on this?

[tigerking]

I pay $35 for 3gb. Where does your pricing come from?

Victor1242,

Sorry my mistake, you are right $35 for 3G but that is even worst.

I also do a route trace from my Vancouver location to voip.freephoneline.ca and the route trace as follow:

I am on company network and therefore all traffic will go to Toronto via Calgary office first.

Vanocuver-Calgary-Toronto-Chicago and than to some routes on xxx.atlas.cogentco.com and finally land on FPL server host-208-65-240-142.static.295.ca. (11 hops).

It is basically depend on how the FPL's server connect with their peers.

In Toronto, two routes to go south in general, one via Chicago internet hub and the diverse route via New York City.

From the trace results, it looks like FPL is peer directly with their US partner at Chicago and from there how to route is all depending on their US partner. The domain I see is the Atlas.congentco.com. But I didn't see any route outside Chicago.

Latency some time high (340ms) some time low (73 ms) but the average is 80 ms that is comply with the latency between Toronto and Vancouver for most telecom service providers.

I mention once again, this is for landline route trace. Wireless route trace could be a big difference.

FPL may be able to step in to give us more insight of how their internet connection would be.

[bridonca]

I would not worry too much about the hops, the latency is negligible compared to the latency from the rocket modem to the cell tower. I wonder if you are using EDGE instead of 3G? Still, 340ms is not that bad, you should be able to carry a decent conversation with that.

For kicks, I would get a free Voxalot account, and use a port like 3060 instead of the default SIP VOIP port 5060. You can add Freephoneline as one of Voxalot's providers.

My experience with VOIP though 3G was mixed. I have a Rogers Portable Internet Pre WIMAX box, and the VOIP is pretty good for the most part. I needed to use G.729 as a codec, because I am only paying for the cheaper version. I had 3G with Virgin for a little while, and though it worked, I would get issues. I feel if I had a really good antenna, I would get better VOIP.

[curriegrad2004]

VoIP over 3G networks isn't a good idea to start with in the first place anyways. High latencies just kill the idea of using 3G networks for VoIP completely. I've been there and I can say it's not fun or all that great to deal with.

With Rogers they provide you a NATed IP address to you, so you can't really do port forwarding at all, and also FPL's SIP doesn't play well with NAT. You can however set up an IP PBX with an OpenVPN server running on it to get around NAT's limitations, but that's just another headache to deal with for most users.

[grmoro]

Hi. VOIP over wireless internet does work with Rogers, Bell, and Telus, but the trick is to change the Codec so that the ATA does not try to go for the most bandwidth possible, hence the lag and dropped packets. Check these urls: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1199403, http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/r ... 9-support-, http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bits ... 6-3600.pdf (check page 3), http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r115826 ... -~start=20. G711 uses very little compression at both ends, hence good quality but needs high badwidth. G729 uses lots of compression and decompression at both ends, hence lags, but G726 and G723 seem to be much better for shared compression and decompression requirements at both ends, and still provides a decent sound quality without needing a lot of bandwidth. Years later, I'm still learning and tinkering with VOIP via wired, wireless, wifi, and 3G connections all over North America for friends and family.

[tbrummell]

I test Voip over 3G/4G WiMax (most National carriers US & Canada) all the time for work. Using G729 we constantly score a MOS of 3.8 which is pretty damn good for G729 on any network. We also test with G711, and have just started with Wideband G722. I've used my Android phone as the 'modem' and it has worked just fine. We've used USB sticks, dedicated cellular gateways, all of it. Don't let anyone tell you it doesn't work, it does. You just need a little time and patience to set it up correctly.

[Ice]

On 3G I sometimes get a lot of jitter... sometimes it's painful depending on where I am. Any experience with G723 tbrummell?

[tbrummell]

Nope, just 711, 729, 722 & iLBC. Mostly 711 & 729 & iLBC for a custom application.

[bridonca]

The lag overhead caused by aggressive g.729 and g.723.1 codecs are pretty small, less than 25 ms. The jitter buffer, which works to ensure a constant flow of audio, can be set to add delay as high as 100ms on some devices, though is usually set at 20 to 30 ms. So a codec and jitter buffer, at worst, typically adds 55 ms delay, which is not noticeable. the problem is that, the wireless WIMAX or 3G device also adds a delay from 200 ms to over 1 second at times. Anything over 300 ms delay gets to be noticeable. That is why people say 3G and WIMAX are not suitable for VOIP. They are for the most part, but the built in latency and jitter can cause problems.