How can I test and learn about voice quality?
Sound Quality - Causes & Solutions
Problem:
How do I fix my sound quality issues? What causes them?
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Resolution:
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The quality of your Internet connection is crucial to good performance with VOIP2320 phone systems. Run the Internet Quality Test to check for possible causes of sound quality such as Jitter or Latency.
Due to the real-time nature of VoIP, your phone service quality might be affected by problems that do not appear during other Internet activities, such as email or web browsing. Your sound quality issues are likely related to one of the connection issues below: Bandwidth Bandwidth is a measure of how much data your connection can transfer at once. Here is an analogy to help you understand bandwidth. Bandwidth is similar to how many lanes are on a highway. On an eight-lane highway you can have more cars on the road at once then you could on a four-lane highway. When you purchase a higher bandwidth connection, you can have more data pass through at once than you can on a smaller connection. Bandwidth can affect your sound quality when there is not enough available. This is why it is important to run a speed test to see how much you have available at the moment. Please look at our bandwidth guide for more information. Latency Latency is how fast the data can travel through your connection. Occasionally, the path your data is traveling on can become congested, which delays the time that the data arrives. Thinking back to the highway analogy, this is like encountering a traffic jam on the highway, which will slow all traffic until the jam is cleaned up. Jitter Jitter is what happens when latencies are not constant. From our analogy above, if there is a traffic jam with one lane left open. Some of the cars pass through fine, while others are severely slowed down. When half of your voice gets to the phone before the other half, the phone has to wait for all of the data. This delay is what causes sound quality issues. Packet Loss Packet loss can occur when latency is far too high. The term literally means that packets of your voice have been lost between the phone and our servers. Packet loss can also be caused by your modem, if it has gone too long without being restarted, or if it is old and not running at full capacity. Please look at our Internet Quality Testto check for problems with Latency, Jitter and Packet Loss. Equipment Issues Both your Internet Service Provider and VOIP2320 highly recommends conducting an entire network restart once every one to two weeks. This can help to ward off many issues with your network possibly dropping packets or becoming out of sync. Please click here for more details on how to conduct this. Equipment can also cause sound quality issues if the firewall settings in the device are not correctly configured. This is typcally only an issue for Enterprise Level equipment such as Sonicwalls, Cisco products, Watchguard Firebox's, etc. To read more about this click here Headphones or bad handsets could be the cause of an isolated sound quality issue. If only one phone is experiencing the issue, try switching to the speakerphone and see if the issue clears up. Troubleshooting Sound Quality IssuesVOIP2320 technicians are happy to help troubleshoot why your location may be experiencing sound quality problems. If you would like to investigate the issue yourself, please review the common causes first, and then locate your issue below.
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** Unlimited Plans do not include calls to International Mobile Phone Numbers or to Special Services Numbers such as Toll-Free or Caller-Paid Information Services or 900 Numbers.