Are Eircom purposely ballsing up blueface calls

JimmySmith

I recently switched from blueface because of bad call quality. No matter what i tried it was never good enough for my needs.
A friend has just told me his theory that Eircom are to blame. He said that his blueface calls to mobiles are perfect and never give quality problems, while his calls to landlines are a problem. People on the other side can hardly hear him. I thinks he might be on to something.
Anyone else noticed this?

WexCan

But... how would they do it?

MrPudding

WexCan wrote:

But... how would they do it?

Easily enough, throttle VoIP traffic to such an extent that the quality suffers.

MrP

lzbones

MrPudding wrote:

Easily enough, throttle VoIP traffic to such an extent that the quality suffers.

MrP

Then it would be the case for ALL calls. If calls to mobiles are OK and calls to landline or NOT then it seems problems are definitely in Blue face court.

WexCan

I have no quality problems with Blueface at all... Landlines and mobiles are clear as a bell. Perhaps a user problem then? But that wouldn't explain the difference between mobiles and landlines.

paulm17781

lzbones wrote:

Then it would be the case for ALL calls. If calls to mobiles are OK and calls to landline or NOT then it seems problems are definitely in Blue face court.

But calls to landlines have to go through Eircon exchanges. Mobile calls don't.

dam099

paulm17781 wrote:

But calls to landlines have to go through Eircon exchanges. Mobile calls don't.

Once it hits the Eircom exchange surely it is no longer VOIP though? So throttling of VOIP traffic would not be the issue. If they were doing something would it not be at the peering point where Blueface interface with their PSTN network?

jimmycrackcorm

I would presume that blueface have an interconnect to eircom for landlines no different to any other telecoms operator. What do blueface say?

It would be worthwhile trying skypeout to see if it impacts on calls to landlines.

aaronc

At Blue Face we currently have 3 different connections to the PSTN in Ireland. Two of these are TDM based, i.e. no VoIP involved, and the other is a SIP/RTP connection.

Customers are statically assigned to one or other of these connections at signup depending on their outgoing callerid. This means that all calls to Irish numbers: landlines, mobiles, 1800, 0818 etc; will be following the same path for a particular customer all the time. So in the case of landlines and mobiles each persons calls will be travelling exactly the same path through our system and onto the Irish PSTN.

From a VoIP user's point of view there are two main questions that need to be answered with regards to call quality:

1. Am I getting some good calls to any number? If the answer is no then there are a lot of things it could be. If the answer is yes then the next question is,

2. What's different with the situation between when the good calls are made and when the bad calls are made? From my experience the most likely things, listed in priority order, are:
- Time of day. Network congestion is by far the biggest cause of poor quality,
- Local activity on your own network. Limewire streams, viruses etc. can consume large amounts of your limited bandwidth and kill VoIP (QoS mechanisms are still far from perfect and only work for upstream),
- Local router. Every router is different and most are fine but bad behaviour can range from dropping RTP packets (these are the ones carrying the voice audio) every 5 seconds resulting in a nice little click to just letting a trickle of packets through resulting in an illegible call,
- Phone. Some phones, newer ones especially, may just not work happily with your ATA. In this case there will often be static or noise on the line. Trying an older more standard phone is a good way to check this one,
- Provider. VoIP providers, Blue Face included, are not perfect and there are occassional glitches that can cause quality issues. In our case and I'm sure those of other providers you can be sure that any system wide issue will quickly be bought to the provider's attention by a flood of support tickets and fixed. There are also a lot of free VoIP services available, www.freeworlddialup.com etc., that can be used to make test calls to see if the issue is provider related. The tests should be done with the same environment and at the same time of day to be of any use though.

Aaron

WexCan

aaronc wrote:

At Blue Face we currently have 3 different connections to the PSTN in Ireland. Two of these are TDM based, i.e. no VoIP involved, and the other is a SIP/RTP connection.

Customers are statically assigned to one or other of these connections at signup depending on their outgoing callerid. This means that all calls to Irish numbers: landlines, mobiles, 1800, 0818 etc; will be following the same path for a particular customer all the time. So in the case of landlines and mobiles each persons calls will be travelling exactly the same path through our system and onto the Irish PSTN.

From a VoIP user's point of view there are two main questions that need to be answered with regards to call quality:

1. Am I getting some good calls to any number? If the answer is no then there are a lot of things it could be. If the answer is yes then the next question is,

2. What's different with the situation between when the good calls are made and when the bad calls are made? From my experience the most likely things, listed in priority order, are:
- Time of day. Network congestion is by far the biggest cause of poor quality,
- Local activity on your own network. Limewire streams, viruses etc. can consume large amounts of your limited bandwidth and kill VoIP (QoS mechanisms are still far from perfect and only work for upstream),
- Local router. Every router is different and most are fine but bad behaviour can range from dropping RTP packets (these are the ones carrying the voice audio) every 5 seconds resulting in a nice little click to just letting a trickle of packets through resulting in an illegible call,
- Phone. Some phones, newer ones especially, may just not work happily with your ATA. In this case there will often be static or noise on the line. Trying an older more standard phone is a good way to check this one,
- Provider. VoIP providers, Blue Face included, are not perfect and there are occassional glitches that can cause quality issues. In our case and I'm sure those of other providers you can be sure that any system wide issue will quickly be bought to the provider's attention by a flood of support tickets and fixed. There are also a lot of free VoIP services available, www.freeworlddialup.com etc., that can be used to make test calls to see if the issue is provider related. The tests should be done with the same environment and at the same time of day to be of any use though.

Aaron

Thanks for that, nice and comprehensive

Blaster99

I've tested Eircom ADSL and Blueface and it's so far the best combo I've seen, ironically. Eircom runs a very sweet network with consistent pings and no packet loss, so if there's a problem I would think it's either at your end or at Blueface's end.

sirlinux

aaronc wrote:

At Blue Face we currently have 3 different connections to the PSTN in Ireland. Two of these are TDM based, i.e. no VoIP involved, and the other is a SIP/RTP connection.

Customers are statically assigned to one or other of these connections at signup depending on their outgoing callerid. This means that all calls to Irish numbers: landlines, mobiles, 1800, 0818 etc; will be following the same path for a particular customer all the time. So in the case of landlines and mobiles each persons calls will be travelling exactly the same path through our system and onto the Irish PSTN.

From a VoIP user's point of view there are two main questions that need to be answered with regards to call quality:

1. Am I getting some good calls to any number? If the answer is no then there are a lot of things it could be. If the answer is yes then the next question is,

2. What's different with the situation between when the good calls are made and when the bad calls are made? From my experience the most likely things, listed in priority order, are:
- Time of day. Network congestion is by far the biggest cause of poor quality,
- Local activity on your own network. Limewire streams, viruses etc. can consume large amounts of your limited bandwidth and kill VoIP (QoS mechanisms are still far from perfect and only work for upstream),
- Local router. Every router is different and most are fine but bad behaviour can range from dropping RTP packets (these are the ones carrying the voice audio) every 5 seconds resulting in a nice little click to just letting a trickle of packets through resulting in an illegible call,
- Phone. Some phones, newer ones especially, may just not work happily with your ATA. In this case there will often be static or noise on the line. Trying an older more standard phone is a good way to check this one,
- Provider. VoIP providers, Blue Face included, are not perfect and there are occassional glitches that can cause quality issues. In our case and I'm sure those of other providers you can be sure that any system wide issue will quickly be bought to the provider's attention by a flood of support tickets and fixed. There are also a lot of free VoIP services available, www.freeworlddialup.com etc., that can be used to make test calls to see if the issue is provider related. The tests should be done with the same environment and at the same time of day to be of any use though.

Aaron

out of interest what are your TDM connections? multiple e1's? an stm/oc3? are you using asterisk with tdm cards? If it's commercially sensitive stuff dont worry about it.

Freddie59

Blaster99 wrote:

I've tested Eircom ADSL and Blueface and it's so far the best combo I've seen, ironically. Eircom runs a very sweet network with consistent pings and no packet loss, so if there's a problem I would think it's either at your end or at Blueface's end.

I've got NTL with exactly the same results.....:D

Cabaal

Freddie59 wrote:

I've got NTL with exactly the same results.....:D

I had/have BT Business with a nice constant 13ms ping to sip.blueface.ie :v: