Hello,

First time poster, occasional reader. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I’m not a network engineer but am more knowledgable than your average Joe.

I work from home for a multi-channel commerce business using VOIP software running on a Twilio backend. I’ve worked using this software at three addresses – one with Spark, one with Slingshot, and one with Trustpower. All except Trustpower have been fine.

We moved into a new place a few months ago with our landlords living upstairs. They have a preexisting fibre connection with Trustpower and have setup an Ethernet port in my office that runs to their router. 

Even since moving into this place I’ve had intermittent issues with calls dropping out (after maybe 5-10 minutes.) The issue is not bad enough that other services seem to be affected. (Normal webpages, streaming, etc. still tends to be mostly okay.) This issue happens for a few days every couple of weeks – enough to make working from home near impossible. Speaking with my ops team at work they can see every call is tagged as high latency and think this is the reason the calls are dropping. 

I’ve spoken to Trustpower directly and they’ve been hugely unhelpful. They see no issues on their end and think the software is to blame. We’ve eliminated potential local issues (reset the router, tried different devices/cables, etc.) Again, same software is working fine from other locations (and has for months.) We also have many other employees across New Zealand and the rest of the world not having issues.  

I’ve been reluctant to look into this but am now considering setting up with our own ISP – likely either 2degrees or Voyager. Would anyone be able to guess whether a new ISP would likely be a solve to this? I’ve run trace routes and speed tests that have been mostly inconclusive to my eyes – although loaded latency with fast.com does seem higher on Trustpower than with Spark. I wouldn’t want to switch to another ISP to have the same issue if it comes down to wiring or something like that. 

Thanks in advance for any help!