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10 Ways To Improve VoIP Quality

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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3 comments August 16th, 2006

Proven VoIP Technology Still Amazes Me.

Sometimes even proven technology seems to amaze me. For my vacation I’ve joined the crew of an internetcafe offering internet services to seascouts joining the Nawaka (a national scoutcamp for waterscouts). We have no dedicated access to DSL but have managed to connect to the Internet via Wi-fi (surpassing a small lake).

I took my laptop with softphone and suddenly it started to ring. It was my father trying to call my mother who was at my home to feed the cat. He was totally surprised to get me on the phone, as was I to have the softphone ringing.

You know it’s proven technology, you know it is possible but sitting in the middle of nowhere but still being connected using al this high-tech gadgets always amazes me.

Technorati : nawaka, voip

Add comment August 2nd, 2006

Even more snappy dialing for Asterisk and Skype!

In this post I already wrote of the benefits of ‘Snap’, a dialer for Asterisk that integrates with Windows XP. Now a new release (0.7) is available. It comes with some major new features like a TAPI driver, integration with Mozilla Thunderbird and support for Skype!

Technorati : asterisk, skype, snap

Add comment June 25th, 2006

Philips comes with Live Messenger phone.

We’ve already seen phones that integrate with Skype, now Philips does the same with Live Messenger. They’ve developped the Live Messenger Phone. The approach is the same as with many of the skype handsets. Connect the base station to a Windows XP computer using USB, see your online contacts on the display of your phone and than call them. You can also plug in a normal landline so you can use the phone to call other people as well.

There are a few things I have against phones like these:

• The need for an operating PC to be able to use it,
• The need for Windows XP.
• Only call to Messenger contacts (or Skype)

I think I’ll stick to my ATA adapter and DECT phone!

Technorati : live messenger, philips, phone, voip

Add comment June 4th, 2006

Find the cheapest service to make your calls.

You might be very into all this modern internet telephony thingy, but your friend overseas isn’t. What do you do? You’ll use a voip service that let’s you connect to the good old telephone network!

But which do you choose? With all those services around it’s a jungle!

Lucky for you, you can use the search engine at MyVoipProvider.com, enter the destination and compare rates. Most off the rates are in dollars or euros and in units of one minute. So it’s easy to compare and choose the right service for you!

Add comment May 19th, 2006