Poor call quality calling 617 areacode lately

[chex]

Hello Guys:

I use my VOIPO service sporadically, but when I do, its because I want to have a good, lengthy, high-quality (sound) low-latency phone call, which is difficult to do on mobile and VOIP-client phones, especially indoors. I often get calls from my parents in the 617 area code, and recently I have noticed that the call quality is poor, low-fidelity, with more latency and drop-outs than normal. The next day, I will make or receive a call from the same number, and it will be fine, and then again the next day it will be bad again. Yesterday I tried to call thru 3 or 4 times, even using another calling-card service to 'dial-around' what could be a bad trunk from VOIPO's service to my parents Telco, but no luck, they all sounded about the same. I also check that my internet connection (Bell Canada DSL) is not busy, and my connection is quiet, no data transferring on my line except my phone call.

Up until a month ago, all the calls were rock solid and sounded great.

Anyone else notice the call quality dropping lately, and/or know whats going on?

- Stefan in Montreal, Canada.

[holmes4]

I have encountered this problem and it seems to coincide with my ISP providing sub-par service, with high latency and dropped packets, as measured by the tool at http://myspeed.visualware.com/

Voipo had me run a ping test that repeatedly pinged the Voipo server. When things were bad, the ping times bounced up and down and sometimes returned errors.

[scott2020]

I get this calling rural areas every couple of months. Sometimes VOIPo can help by terminating calls with another carrier.

[tritch]

I get this calling rural areas every couple of months. Sometimes VOIPo can help by terminating calls with another carrier.

Yep, some strange stuff going on with rural carriers. I've got a friend that lives in rural East Texas and has 2 POTS lines with CenturyLink. I called him regularly on his primary line for over a year with no problems at all, then suddenly last October I started having one-way audio problems. Voipo's support rep (Cody) fixed the issue with that one phone number and it's been working ever since. The other day I had to call his secondary number and the same one-way audio issue. Since I rarely call this number I haven't bothered support to fix this number, but nonetheless there are issues calling 903-895-XXXX numbers. I suspect Voipo's choice of carriers to some areas are having a detrimental effect for some users....