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Aptela Knowledge Base » Network Configuration » What can I do about dropped calls, choppy audio, or other call quality issues?

What can I do about dropped calls, choppy audio, or other call quality issues?

One-way or No Audio

One-way Audio is when one person cannot hear the other but the call is still active. One-way audio is always caused by a router or firewall that either needs to be configured or is misbehaving in some way. If the audio goes one-way immediately on calling, then that can be fixed by configuration. If the audio goes one-way part way through a conversation, that is caused by header re-writing by the router.

See our router configuration guides for information on setting up routers for use with VoIP services.

Choppy Audio or Echo

Choppy or broken up audio is primarily caused by a congested network, most often either the local network or the broadband connection to the public internet. The congested network causes packets to be lost or arrive out of order which causes gaps in the audio signal.

Troubleshooting a local network and the internet connection:

Check your internet bandwidth with a speedtest.. This tells you your connection throughput available to you. You will need about 50-70k per voice call. Divide the smaller of the your test numbers that gives you the number of calls your broadband connection should support.

While on a call on your Aptela Polycom phone, hit the Menu button followed by 2, 2, 3, 2. This will show the statistics for that call. The key line is the lost packets. The Polycom phones count high out of order packets as lost so this number will reflect a network that either is losing packets or that has high latency and jitter.

In troubleshooting, it is often useful, to isolate components by eliminating as many factors as possible. Turn of computers, servers, or firewalls. Then turn them on one by one while continuing to test calls and see if any affect the call. Hidden software programs, good and bad, can impact your network performance. For example, many Microsoft Windows updates are scheduled during the mid-day to check and download updates. With multiple machines, this can flood a network. Worse are spyware or worms that flood the your network with traffic.

In many networks, Quality of Service (QoS) is recommended. QoS prioritizes some traffic over others. Traffic can be prioritized via several differing methods based on router and firewall type you may have. In many cases, simple physical port based QoS is the simplest and most direct way to set up QoS. Please refer to your IT specialist on the best way to set-up QoS for your particular network design.

Additional info: This site monitors the health of various networks. If you run a trace and see traffic passing over a given network, this may be useful in monitoring real-time health of the public internet: http://internetpulse.net/

Dropped Calls

Common causes:
Phones sharing the same ports can cause dropped calls when one phone "steps" on the port of another. This is more common with manually configured phones. Each phone should have their own unique local port setting. If your phones are provided by Aptela and are using the auto-configuration process, then all phones are users are assigned automatically their own local ports.

See phone configuration guides for non-Aptela provided phones.

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