How important is latency

fisab

Hi,

I've been using Blueface for the past 9 months. Very happy with it but the echo is finally getting to me. To be fair, technical support has been very helpful but I'm conscious that the problem might be an ISP one (local wireless provider).
I ping 160-180ms to blueface and 18 hops through London.

Is this simply too high or has anyone else those sort of figures?

Bandwidth isnt a problem (1M/1M up&down most of which I get all the time).
I'm using the Sipuria 2100 ATA default G711u but I've assumed my bandwidth can take it. I probably should experiment with G729 but I see latency as more of an issue.

Anyone using VOIP successfully with those sort of pings?

Many thanks for any help on the matter.

Blaster99

It should work up to 300ms. Astrisk does echo training and you'll normally notice how the echo goes away after a little while. Usually G.729 helps a bit. I incidently sometimes get echo with much lower latency, so I'm not so sure the problem is all at your end. Incidently, if you hear echo that's traditionally a problem at the other end but who knows with this VoIP lark.

steve-hosting36

300ms round trip? If you are seeing 180ms one way to blueface, then your providers latency is certainly not helping (nearly a half second round trip). Who is the ISP?

fisab

Nova Networks in Cork.
To be fair the service is excellent apart from latency - which is average.

Blaster99

What's your latency to smart076.ie or sip.broadtalk.ie? You can't ping the latter but if you do a tracert you'll get an idea. They might even have a setup that is better at reducing echo, you never know.

fisab

Changing from G.711 to G.729 has made a remarkable difference (albeit based only on 4 phone calls). The echo has gone, the voice quality is a bit "duller" but more than acceptable with the echo gone.
Why would that make a difference on a good bandwidth line?
Is it something to do with less packets being sent so the latency between packets isnt as bad?

fisab

Blaster99 wrote:

What's your latency to smart076.ie or sip.broadtalk.ie? You can't ping the latter but if you do a tracert you'll get an idea. They might even have a setup that is better at reducing echo, you never know.

Thanks for the info Blaster99, yea, I ping 50-60ms to smart076 and 60-70ms to Broadtalk (compared with 160-180ms to Blueface). I ported my local number to Blueface and really dont want to have to go thru that again though. I'll see how the change to G729 performs over the weekend.

Blaster99

The potential good news is that Blueface is getting INEX connectivity which both the others I mentioned have, so once that's in place you should get similar latency from Blueface.

Thanks to our glorious regulator, porting between VoIP providers isn't on the cards as ComReg thinks the current 6-8 week mechanism that needs to involve eircom (and another third party) is perfect.

fisab

Yea it is a bit of a joke that to port to another VOIP company, I'd have to reactivate my eircom line, port the number back to eircom, then port from eircom to the other VOIP company, and then deactivate the eircom line!!

I thought Blueface recently got set up with INEX. And that the reason I was still getting bad pings was that my ISP wasnt peering with it. So it might get better. That is good news.

TimTim

fisab wrote:

I thought Blueface recently got set up with INEX. And that the reason I was still getting bad pings was that my ISP wasnt peering with it. So it might get better. That is good news.

First of all Nova would have to get into INEX first

Unless they are going by a different name, they currently aren't in the peering matrix, so it might be a while off yet.

whowantstwoknow

fisab wrote:

Changing from G.711 to G.729 has made a remarkable difference (albeit based only on 4 phone calls). The echo has gone, the voice quality is a bit "duller" but more than acceptable with the echo gone.
Why would that make a difference on a good bandwidth line?
Is it something to do with less packets being sent so the latency between packets isnt as bad?

WHat does the @xxms signify? And which xx setting would be reccommended?

Thanks
Mike