Recommended Mobile Hardware

[Intellagentz]

i've been using an older model Samsung mobile phone as well as IPhone 4 for mobile fongo over wi-if and 3G. Call quality has been less than ideal despite changes and adjustments to user/phone settings. I recently bought an IPad Mini 2 and found call quality to be excellent (using ear phone and mic).

Can anyone recommend mobile phones that have provided excellent call quality. Seems to me that quality is as much a function of the hardware as anything else.

I'm in Toronto so would be particularly interested in hearing from neighbours (if possible). However I'm all ears.

Thanks

[405peugeot]

Nexus 5 works great on LTE

[bridonca]

From my understanding, the way VOIP is set up on the Apple, it is much harder for any telco to shape VOIP traffic, so shockingly, it sounds better. With Android, not so much. It is your carrier that is the problem, not the phone.

Amazingly, if you put the VOIP traffic though a VPN tunnel, your voice quality will greatly improve.

[I. Tichy]

From my understanding, the way VOIP is set up on the Apple, it is much harder for any telco to shape VOIP traffic, so shockingly, it sounds better. With Android, not so much. It is your carrier that is the problem, not the phone.

Amazingly, if you put the VOIP traffic though a VPN tunnel, your voice quality will greatly improve.

may I ask you, what cellphone provider are you talking about (shaping voip traffic)?

and what VPN is good to use for voip?

I'm planning to go with an internet only cellphone plan, and then to port my cellphone number to Fongo, however,
the quality of connection still worries me (Bell HSPA+ network).

I tried different parameters with android fongo app and with different phones,
(low/high bandwidth codecs, various combinations of the echo cancelling options etc)
but I was never able to obtain consistently stable and good voice.

Sometimes it is pretty good, sometimes it is choking, even if the signal strength seems good (e.g. when moving few tens of meters around, inside or outside) ... confused about possible solutions..

[bridonca]

I have used Virgin, President's Choice Mobility, Rogers, Speakout, Eastlink, Telus with their Data plan. I also used Rogers Portable Internet when it was around. Only Rogers Portable Internet had consistent, decent quality VOIP, and that was because Rogers did not have the ability to shape Wimax!

OpenVPN is probably your best option when it comes to a VPN, For a VPN client, I was using FeatVPN http://www.featvpn.com/
I have used http://www.securitykiss.com as a VPN provider. The free tier has a data limit of 300 MB a day, which should a reasonable limit for VOIP.

I wish I could say OpenVPN is a solution to your VOIP problem, but it is hard on the battery, and sometimes there is still the occasional voice quality issue, just not a bad as unencrypted.

Rogers offers a prepaid $100 a year after 6 pm evenings and weekends plan, with 100 minutes a year daytime calling. If you are not much of a daytime gabber, it is a pretty good deal for reliable voice. Put the SIM in a cheap flip phone, and let the smart phone take care of the data plan. Virgin sells a 5 GB tablet plan for $35, which is not bad.

[I. Tichy]

I have used Virgin, President's Choice Mobility, Rogers, Speakout, Eastlink, Telus with their Data plan. I also used Rogers Portable Internet when it was around. Only Rogers Portable Internet had consistent, decent quality VOIP, and that was because Rogers did not have the ability to shape Wimax!

OpenVPN is probably your best option when it comes to a VPN, For a VPN client, I was using FeatVPN http://www.featvpn.com/
I have used http://www.securitykiss.com as a VPN provider. The free tier has a data limit of 300 MB a day, which should a reasonable limit for VOIP.

I wish I could say OpenVPN is a solution to your VOIP problem, but it is hard on the battery, and sometimes there is still the occasional voice quality issue, just not a bad as unencrypted.

Rogers offers a prepaid $100 a year after 6 pm evenings and weekends plan, with 100 minutes a year daytime calling. If you are not much of a daytime gabber, it is a pretty good deal for reliable voice. Put the SIM in a cheap flip phone, and let the smart phone take care of the data plan. Virgin sells a 5 GB tablet plan for $35, which is not bad.

OK, thank you for details. So, VPN is not a good solution. Battery life is a serious factor.

BTW, what would be the evidence for "VOIP traffic shaping"? And is it legal at all?
Maybe if one finds hard evidence and complains to CCTS (especially en masse ),
this might encourage cell providers stop doing voip traffic shaping?

Just now I tried to compare my WiFi with Bell HSPA+ network from my cellphone using the google play
app called Voiptester, and the only difference i see consistently is in "network jitter":
7-8 ms for HSPA+ versus 1-2 ms for WiFi.
The "latency or ping times" are about 100 ms for Wifi and can erratically jump anywhere from 100 ms up to 600 ms for HSPA+
(the server is in Germany though).

Which if these is the bottleneck for VOIP quality? Or maybe there are other important parameters to check?

My Fongo works just fine over WiFi, but stutters often on HSPA+.

BTW, would LTE help (do they "shape" it too?)?
I did not try it yet, because, as I hear, the LTE coverage is still rather narrow, so it cannot be considered a s a good solution for now.

The whole idea of going pure internet plan is very attractive, though...

[bridonca]

Latency in 3G was always bad, not going to blame the telco for that. Jitter on the other hand, can be introduced

The net neutrality laws in Canada seem rather toothless. I think only one ISP, Xplorenet, actually got charged for blocking Skype from their satellite internet, when coincidentally, Xplorenet's VOIP worked fine. That was it. No one else got charged. If Xplorenet was just a little bit sneakier, allowing skype calls to sound like crap, they would not have been charged either.

It could be argued, that calls going through a VPN sound good, and bad unencrypted, is just an unfortunate coincidence, and the telco will work harder to make VOIP though a VPN sound worse from now on. So you are not going to get much help from the law.

Simple solution with Open VPN being hard on the battery, get a phone with a better battery. I am eyeing a Galaxy S4 with a zero lemon 7500 mah battery. Massive, but still portable, and 3 days battery full out!

[I. Tichy]

Latency in 3G was always bad, not going to blame the telco for that. Jitter on the other hand, can be introduced

It could be argued, that calls going through a VPN sound good, and bad unencrypted, is just an unfortunate coincidence, and the telco will work harder to make VOIP though a VPN sound worse from now on. So you are not going to get much help from the law.

Simple solution with Open VPN being hard on the battery, get a phone with a better battery. I am eyeing a Galaxy S4 with a zero lemon 7500 mah battery. Massive, but still portable, and 3 days battery full out!

based on what you are saying it makes sense to try VPN.

BTW, I've re-run voiptester on HSPA+ Bell network a few times this morning, and now I'm able to reach 1xx ms ping times and 1-2ms jitter to a German server,
same as over WiFi!

Perhaps it is simply because of a quiet time of day when cellular networks are not congested?
This also suggests that maybe there is no intentional voip traffic shaping by pproviders at all, only the congested networks are to blame?

And speaking of benefit of VPN for VOIP, maybe it is coincidental - sending data through a VPN channel just makes the data flow smoother?

Well, thank you anyway, I'll try to play with VPNs now ..

[bridonca]

When the network is not congested, the traffic is still shaped, it is just not as aggressively as if there is congestion. I am not entirely sure if the affect on VOIP quality of traffic shaping is intentional, but the telcos are not exactly doing anything to fix the problem either. I just know that shaping encrypted traffic is much harder to do without severely peeving someone off, so it is usually not done.

You might have a point that the OpenVPN protocol might be protecting the VOIP traffic, because it does send packets using TCP, which resends bad packets, but that introduces more latency. SIP usually send packets via UDP, less latency, but if there are bad packets, they are lost. Most VOIP codecs can tolerate a certain percentage of bad packets and still sound good. But delayed packets caused by jitter is another story. And traffic shaping seems to produce a lot of jitter

[I. Tichy]

Tried to use fongo with securitykiss vpn (pptp, built-in client, android 4.3).

internet works fine, and shows my ip address as toronto server i chose..

However Fongo app is not even able to login (stuck with green notification)..

maybe i should try openvpn client instead?...
though i do not see how it matters to Fongo..

are fongo not allowing vpns to connect?

damn...

[bridonca]

Yeah, you need to use OpenVPN, which supports UDP tunneling. The VPN option(s) you chose, while easier to configure, only support TCP tunneling. SIP VOIP usually requires UDP, of which Fongo needs.

[I. Tichy]

Thanks a lot, Bridonca, for all your suggestions.

Unfortunately OpenVPN did not work for me up to now. Same symptoms - Fongo stuck at green notification - "Connecting to Fongo".

Tried three openvpn clients - OpenVPN Connect, OpenvPN client by Arne Schwabe, and Feat VPN, all with the SecurityKISS generated *.ovpn config file -
none worked..

What could be the problem?

[bridonca]

Yikes! To be honest, I never used the Fongo client with OpenVPN, I was using a SIP client that came with Android with Freephoneline SIP settings. so there might be a chance Fongo might just not work. I will have to do more experimentation to make sure.

[I. Tichy]

apparently it is not only fongo's problem.

i tried zoiper to voip.ms, and it is also stuck at registering..

some weird authentication problem over a vpn,

or they both (fongo and voip.ms) banned the securitykiss
vpn toronto server?