[WXC/VFX] VFX over IPStar satellite revisited

Forums › One New Zealand (including Vodafone, WxC, Farmside) › [WXC/VFX] VFX over IPStar satellite revisited

1 | 2 | 3

3594 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

WorldxChange

#87317 20-Sep-2007 09:28

TinyTim:
sidney: CBR has been enabled. They asked me for the "VOIP GW IP address" and I told them 58.28.20.150

There was no improvement :-

Sidney, I'm not an expert, but is 16kb/s CBR enough for VoIP?
Once you have this sorted out would be interested to hear your opinion on the quality of calls with both parties on satellite.

Atually very good point and I missed this in your post, how much CIR did they allocate 16kbs will not do it for G729 try 64

Yes I am a employee of WxC (My Profile) ... but I do have my own opinions as well

https://www.facebook.com/wxccommunications

sidney

81 posts

Master Geek

#87324 20-Sep-2007 09:41

TinyTim: Sidney, I'm not an expert, but is 16kb/s CBR enough for VoIP?

I'm no expert either, but I believe from references I've seen to this that 16kb/s would be enough. It's been very difficult for me to get information with an ICONZ sales support rep being a buffer between me and IPSTAR, or maybe even a buffer between me and an ICONZ technical person who doesn't know much about this who then talks to IPSTAR. I asked for "16kb/s of CIR/CBR" months ago when I thought that's what I might need, and instead of being told something like "IPSTAR says that what you need for VOIP is to have X and Y and Z configured thus and thus" they just said "IPSTAR have set it up as you requested, let us know if it helps." Now I have no idea what they actually did ... It make no sense at all given the fact that this time when I found out the right words to ask for they could not enable it without knowing the ip addresses of the VOIP server and of my SPA2102.

Maverick can probably tell you the bit rate of the CBR that they have set up on their IPSTAR connection. I suspect that he has a more direct contact with someone at IPSTAR who is knowledgeable about setting up for VOIP.

-- sidney

sidney

81 posts

Master Geek

#87327 20-Sep-2007 09:46

maverick:very good point and I missed this in your post, how much CIR did they allocate 16kbs will not do it for G729 try 64

Whoa! That could explain it! I'll ask right away. I have no confidence that anyone I've been talking to would take it upon themselves to interpret my request as "please set this up properly for VOIP and if you don't know how find the person who does". Hmm, maybe that is exactly what I should ask :)

[update] Ok, I'm afraid I have been an obnoxious customer and I sent a rant asking not only that they bump the CIR to 64kbps, but that actually find someone at IPSTAR who knows how to configure things to support VOIP and will set up my connection properly instead of blindly implementing my wild guesses about it.

-- sidney

sidney

81 posts

Master Geek

#87361 20-Sep-2007 14:00

maverick: try 64

I sent in the request for 64.

IPSTAR asked me via ICONZ for some details about your IPSTAR setup so they can compare yours with mine. I sent the question to you by private message here and also by email, so please check your inbox.

Thanks,

-- sidney

maverick

3594 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

WorldxChange

#87362 20-Sep-2007 14:08

Sorry Sidney, this I can't actually do the company we are working with requires a NDA (Non Diclosure Agreement) and I can not pass any info on reguarding their setup in a way it would be Orcon or ITalk asking me how we configur our devices .....very sorry about this bit I can not pass any details on. I can only give you general information hope you understand.

Yes I am a employee of WxC (My Profile) ... but I do have my own opinions as well

https://www.facebook.com/wxccommunications

sidney

81 posts

Master Geek

#87367 20-Sep-2007 14:24

maverick: the company we are working with requires a NDA (Non Diclosure Agreement) and I can not pass any info on regarding their setup

Ok, I understand. I thought that I was lucky to avoid that problem because it is a question about how IPSTAR has set things up for you vs how they set things up for me and the only people who have to know about it are IPSTAR. That's why I gave you the name of the IPSTAR contact in the email I sent you, in case you would not want to reveal the information to me or to ICONZ. I'll just tell them that they will have to use their own expertise or use their own resources to track down their records of your setup.

Thanks anyway,

-- sidney

maverick

3594 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

WorldxChange

#87368 20-Sep-2007 14:33

The IPStar connection is being supplied and looked after by a 3rd party company not IPStar themselves , I have no direct contact at all with IPStar, sorry should have made that clearer

Yes I am a employee of WxC (My Profile) ... but I do have my own opinions as well

https://www.facebook.com/wxccommunications

Equinox IT

Cloud spending continues to surge globally, but most organisations haven’t made the changes necessary to maximise the value and cost-efficiency benefits of their cloud investments. Download the whitepaper From Overspend to Advantage now.

sidney

81 posts

Master Geek

#87378 20-Sep-2007 15:22

Success!!!! IPSTAR increased the CIR to 64/64. We tried a brief call to Australia, and that was perfect, then a long call to the US, to a number which was unusably bad every time we tried it, and the call was also perfect in both directions.

Phil, could you check your logs for the stats on the call to the US we made at approximately 3pm for approximately 20 minutes? I would love to see the packet loss statistics for that call.

Thanks for everything!

-- sidney

maverick

3594 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

WorldxChange

#87389 20-Sep-2007 16:27

Great, good to hear Sidney,

However still not to happy with the results I see , Here are the stats for the call to the US still we see packet loss, however it appears your Voice Quality has improved, see how you go for a while to see if it stays the same

Timestamp     : 15:22:39.851 2007-09-20
Direction     : RX
Remote IP/Port: xxx.xxx.140.182
Local IP/Port : 
Transport     : UDP
----------------------------------------
BYE sip:0018xxxxxx583@as.wxcnz.net;maddr=;transport=UDP SIP/2.0
Via: SIP/2.0/UDP xxx.xxx140.182:;branch=z9hG4bK-4fd6ecee
From: 09xxxxx39 <sip:9xxxxx39@as.wxcnz.net>;tag=613a90c4e8fb5d0co0
To: <sip:0018xxxxx583@as.wxcnz.net>;tag=96141c3a-13c4-46f1e206-2e396369-71e0fcb
Call-ID: a9bf0524-bb7a742c@202.37.140.182
CSeq: 103 BYE
Max-Forwards: 70
User-Agent: Linksys/SPA2102-5.1.6
P-RTP-Stat: PS=69782,OS=1395640,PR=57421,OR=1117812,PL=2520,JI=13,LA=0,DU=1384,EN=G729a,DE=G729a
Content-Length: 0

Yes I am a employee of WxC (My Profile) ... but I do have my own opinions as well

https://www.facebook.com/wxccommunications

sidney

81 posts

Master Geek

#87394 20-Sep-2007 16:46

maverick: P-RTP-Stat: PS=69782,OS=1395640,PR=57421,OR=1117812,PL=2520,JI=13,LA=0,DU=1384,EN=G729a,DE=G729a

That is strange. I just talked to the IPSTAR person directly. He had me ping my modem, an IPSTAR server, and your VOIP server, and there was no packet loss in the ping test. He wanted to know if you can tell where the packet loss is occuring, at what point in the network. Is there a way to determine that? Is there a way of getting any more information about the characteristics or the cause of the packet loss?

[update] (smacks head) I was reading the results of the ping wrong. ping shows the packets sent and received but doesn't show how many are lost until I ctrl-C it. I didn't notice the "6% packet loss" on the last line.

-- sidney

coffeebaron

6233 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#87398 20-Sep-2007 17:13

A couple of things to consider. Firstly I think the IPStar Satellite is quite low in the horizon, which means if you have some hills to the west of you, then this could affect the signal strength of you connection. Also if the dish is a little miss aligned etc, then same too.

Sidney, I'm sure this is something you will have checked in your ongoing troubleshooting, but thought it would be worth mentioning just in case.

Phil, the other interesting scenario to try would be to get CBR disabled on your IPStar setup, and see what difference that makes too.

Anyway, just my few thoughts. I had dealings with one of these a while ago that we just couldn't get right, due to a big hill close by. Was a very erratic connection.

Rural IT and Broadband support.

Broadband troubleshooting and master filter installs.
Starlink installer - one month free: https://www.starlink.com/?referral=RC-32845-88860-71
Wi-Fi and networking
Cel-Fi supply and installer - boost your mobile phone coverage legally

Need help in Auckland, Waikato or BoP? Click my email button, or email me direct: [my user name] at geekzonemail dot com

sidney

81 posts

Master Geek

#87513 21-Sep-2007 11:18

maverick: However still not to happy with the results I see

Apparently neither is the phone

Some local calls this morning were back to the old low quality. I had a browser window open on the SPA2102's voice stats page and saw a consistent packet loss between 2 and 3% and jitter jumping across the range 0 to 28msec. Incoming voice stuttered very badly much of the time.

I am hopeful about one thing: I can ping the IPSTAR ip address they asked me to check and see a consistent packet loss of usually between 2 and 3 percent, going as high as 6%. I can also ping my modem from a computer at University of Auckland and I see the same level of packet loss. So if I am lucky IPSTAR will be able to see the loss when they ping and will be able to track down the problem, and it doesn't even have to do with anything specific to VOIP or WorldXchange, and maybe not even with ICONZ.

I'm about to get on the phone with the IPSTAR tech person and see what he can do with this.

-- sidney

maverick

3594 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

WorldxChange

#87517 21-Sep-2007 11:40

hmmm thats what I was expecting by the results,

We have another customer who has been watching this topic and also uses an IPStar supplied by another resller he has asked provider to make the changes and he has reported a greatly improved service since the changes were made and was seeing similar quality to what we are seeing here, so if you see this Glenn fell free to drop in with your experience's with and without the CIR / CBR profiles applied

Yes I am a employee of WxC (My Profile) ... but I do have my own opinions as well

https://www.facebook.com/wxccommunications

sidney

81 posts

Master Geek

#87526 21-Sep-2007 12:22

Thanks, it gives me much hope that you have two examples of VOIP working well with IPSTAR, especially since I wondered if you had some kind of high availability business account.

I finally got to learn the difference between CIR and CBR after talking to the IPSTAR tech person, or at least now I think I understand it.

CBR enables the prioritising of VOIP packets from a particular ip address to a particular ip address. It is enabled on the IPSTAR gateway terminal to give priority to VOIP packets from the server of the VOIP provider, and on the modem to give priority to VOIP packets from the VOIP device to the server. With CBR enabled, the VOIP packets to/from the VOPI server it is configured for do not get delayed by data packets that arrive at the same time.

CIR (Committed Information Rate) is a guarantee that a certain amount of bandwidth is continuously available. Without CIR, the bandwidth that you measure when you do a speed test is an average, but there is no certainty that when you need the bandwidth to send a specific voice packet that it will be there right away. When I had 64/64 CIR enabled, then any connection I have will have at least 64Kbps available to it in each direction.

Or at least that's how I garbled the explanations I was given, but it does explain why both are needed, why you have to know the VOIP server's ip address for the CBR configuration, why you have to specify a bandwidth for the CIR configuration.

-- sidney

Glenn

1 post

Wannabe Geek

#87677 22-Sep-2007 18:10

Hi Sidney, I have the same set up as you, but Wireless Nation as my IP provider. I to had all the same problems using VFX over ipstar as you untill I had CBR enabled for me last week. I am not shure if CIR was enabled.

Post CBR, call quality has been close to perfect. Jitter a thing of the past, smooth is how I would describe it now. I note the change in my teenage children wanting to phone freinds now rather than txt them. No lag in conversation now, so people dont tend to talk over the top of each other any more. This during a period of unsettled weather.

I have done a few traces during calls and only seem to get 0 - 1% packet loss, hardly noticeable.

So it makes me wonder if CBR is actually enabled for you, I remember the odd call pre CBR also was very good, but more the exception rather than usual.I note there has been no mention of VFX ports in this thread ( what ever they are?), but it seemed to be an intergral part of getting VFX working over ipstar.

Must take the opertunity to thank VFX and Wireless Nation getting me a phone working well, while living in the middle of no where, great customer care from both companys.

1 | 2 | 3