Echo on VoIP Calls

Question

We use Ring Central for VoIP. I inherited this company and so that's the service we have, and I know nothing about VoIP. We have increased our bandwidth to 80Mb down and 6+Mb up, and that's as high as we can go. We might have 5-10 people on the phone, usually 5 or less, at any given time.

I get complaints about dropped calls and think that might go away after the increased bandwidth, but echos are another issue. How can I trace echos on our calls? Thank you, I appreciate this!

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score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 05 '14 at 07:54

Echo is not a VOIP-only issue, it also occurs on traditional phone systems. But echo is more noticeable in VOIP because of the increased latencies.

Beyond ensuring that the microphones are not picking up noise from the environment or from speakerphones, the best thing you can do to ensure no echo is to have low latency to Ringcentral's servers.

It's not a matter of more bandwidth, but of less travel time between your office and their servers. You can use a tool like Pingplotter to measure latency (make sure you set the packet type to UDP).

Here are things that you can do to improve the voice quality:

Make sure that your voice traffic has priority over your data traffic.
Make sure that no other sources of traffic can trample over your voice packets
Segregate your data from your voice traffic and send it through 2 different ISPs
Get a data T1 - you will see sub 10ms RTTs instead of 40-50ms on cable
Make sure your IP phones are wired all the way to the router -- wifi introduces lots of variability to a network's latency

I can see your points for most of the bullets except for the T1 suggestion yielding sub 10ms RTTs. T1 simply is no guarantee of low RTTs; in fact at larger packet sizes the T1 serialization delay alone is non - trivial, which could require a fragmentation technology such as LFI to mitigate it. Wifi is perfectly suitable for voip when used correctly. — Mike Pennington, Jul 05 '14 at 08:25

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 04 '14 at 22:30

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Echo is caused by electrical interactions (like headsets) nothing in the IP part of the environment has anything to do with echo. In my environment headsets are the most common cause of echo.

answered Jul 04 '14 at 22:30

fredpbaker

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we will test without headsets for a bit and see if that removes the problem – Samuel Fullman Jul 04 '14 at 23:00
However echo cancellation may be done in software which requires packets. – rjt Jul 05 '14 at 23:08
Echo can also happen when a the SIP packet is even partially retransmiited for any reason by any device in the path. – rjt Jul 05 '14 at 23:10

Echo on VoIP Calls

2 Answers2