Section 8.2. Improving Your Call Quality

8.2. Improving Your Call Quality

When your traditional telephone line sounds bad, you have little recourse. Okay, no recourse. But you can affect the sound quality of your broadband phone connections. Most of the recommendations from providers focus on you not messing up the voice quality, because they believe their quality sparkles.

8.2.1. Manage Your Bandwidth

For high quality conversations over a broadband phone of any type, you need about 90 Kbps. When you're listening, that slice of bandwidth comes from the downstream portion of your connection, and when you're speaking, you need room on the upstream portion of your connection.

Many technical people believe "broadband" means at least 2 Mbps (or 2,000 Kbps) of bandwidth. Some even believe you shouldn't call it broadband until it's at least 10 Mbps (10,000 Kbps). European and Asian countries agree with those high speeds, but the U.S. Federal Communications Commission allows vendors to call DSL "broadband" at 384 Kbps downstream and 128 Kbps upstream bandwidth. And these companies do that with a straight face.

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Note: Getting More Than You GiveFor a variety of technical reasons (and to reduce their cost of equipment), broadband service providers deliver different speeds downstream (to you) and upstream (from you). Ratings appear, in small print, like 384 Kbps/128 Kbps or 3 Mbps/1 Mbps. The larger (first) number is your downstream bandwidth while the smaller (second) number is your upstream bandwidth. Few residences have a symmetrical broadband connection (the same speeds upstream and downstream) although that is common for businesses.

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If your broadband connection upstream is above 512 Kbps, you can have two or three broadband phone conversations online at once with no problem. If your upstream connection is in the 1Mbps range, as is the case with many cable providers, you're in great shape for almost any residential broadband phone application, including multiple calls concurrently.

If your broadband connection upstream is limited to 128 Kbps, you can have a single broadband phone conversation with excellent quality. But if someone else in the house starts anything that demands a lot of bandwidth from your Internet connection, such as playing an online game or uploading files, your call quality will drop.

Easy answer? Upgrade your broadband connection. Unfortunately, that's not always possible. Worse, when you upgrade, you spend more money on your connection, somewhat negating the savings you get from switching to broadband phones.

Typical answer? If the bandwidth siphoned away from your broadband phone connection drops your call bandwidth too low, the call may drop. In that case, especially with phone-centric providers, you need to lower the phone's bandwidth demands so the call will stay connected at lower bandwidth.

Vonage offers a tool called Bandwidth Saver to handle exactly this type of situation. You can find this screen when you log in and click on Features (the menu choice just to the right of the middle of the menu choices showing in Figure 8-3) and choosing Bandwidth Saver. They have configured three settings: normal, higher, and highest quality. The default is to the highest quality.

Looking at Figure 8-3, you can see normal sound quality is 30 Kbps, higher is 50 Kbps, and highest is 90 Kbps. If you believe you're getting cheated by using only 30 Kbps for the normal quality phone settings, go back to Chapter 1 and reread how digital telephone conversations save bandwidth and improve call quality.

Choosing a lower setting will allow your available bandwidth to better maintain your call connection while still providing adequate support for other demands. I won't lie to you and tell you that a heavy load on your Internet connection will never degrade your call quality, because it will have an impact. But by adjusting your call's bandwidth requirements, you can keep the call from losing so many packets in the conversation that the connection drops out, and that's an improvement.

Figure 8-3. Adjusting Vonage call quality

8.2.2. Upgrade Your Headset

Skype and other softphone users can make an enormous improvement in call quality by upgrading your headset. And if you don't have a headset, get one.

Inexpensive headsets are engineered to deliver the frequency range needed for traditional telephone line voice calls. The frequency range provided by Skype dwarfs the traditional telephone call range, but cheap headsets won't reflect that improvement.

You won't hear as much improvement with a better headset in your calls from the softphone to traditional telephone lines, because the traditional line drags down the quality. But a good headset on each end of the conversationmeaning a good microphone for someone to speak into and a good speaker to relay the soundmakes a Skype call sound amazingly lifelike.

8.2.3. Quality of Service Technology

Remember the mentions of Quality of Service back in Chapter 4? That technique allows routers to prioritize packets based on their information. By fall 2005, some of the new routers delivered by Vonage and other phone-centric providers will include Quality of Service technology. These traffic-control techniques work only when both ends of the connection work together, so the other phone providers must retrofit their end to match, as well.

Business broadband phone services include this technology. Small business and residential routers sometimes have Quality of Service options, but today those provide value only when two similar routers communicate. But as Quality of Service technology rolls downhill to affordable home routers, voice packet traffic control will increase, as will the quality of sounds for all broadband phone conversations.