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10 Ways To Improve VoIP Quality

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August 16th, 2006

Many people ask if the quality of VoIP connections is the same as plain old telephony. When in luck, you hardly hear the difference. If you’re not, there are a few things you could do to improve your connection.

1. Use hardware phones rather than softphones.

Get yourself a real VoIP telephone or Analogue Telephone Adapter (ATA, a device that connects POTS telephones to a VoIP service). Such a device doesn’t have to share it resources with a PC since it operates on its own.

2. Get a headset or USB handset.

If you decide to stay with a softphone, get a headset or USB handset. You will still need your computer but it eliminates background noise since the microphone is closer to the mouth. And with sound only coming from the tiny speaker you’ll likely have less echoing.

3. Get a stable broadband connection.

Yep, you’ll need broadband and it needs to be good. Not only plenty of bandwidth, but also good latency. When you see ping values going up en down, you’re probably in trouble.

4. Get the right codec.

Some codecs are better in quality but require more bandwidth. Using some high-quality codec with too little bandwidth will bring you poorer performance. Calculate how much bandwidth you need with the bandwidth calculator.

5. Get the best upload you can.

Some Internet connections are asymmetric (like ADSL). Most of the time this means that you’ll have plenty of download speed but not too much upload. The better the upload speed, the better the codec you can use.

6. Don’t hog your connection.

Sharing your connection with other bandwidth consuming software like P2P or streaming media will leave less bandwidth for your talking. Turn them off if you are experiencing stutter or otherwise bad connection.

7. Tune your audio settings.

Take some time to tune your audio settings. Especially input levels for the microphone are important. Make them not too loud but also not to weak. Try Skype’s echo service to hear yourself back and decide if settings are right.

8. Use QoS

QoS (Quality Of Service) gives priority to certain types of traffic. Sometimes it’s already built in your router or operating system, or you can build one yourself.

9. Use echo cancellation

If your software supports it, turn on echo cancellation. It’s a software algorithm that prevents you from hearing yourself back. Use this if you are not able to use a headset.

10. Find a quiet environment to talk.

This one goes for every conversation. Find a nice and quiet place to talk so all kind of background noise won’t distract or use your precious bandwidth. Most codecs are optimized for speech so other types of noise will not compress as well as speech.

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