Is it just me...tickets never seem to get resolved.

[christcorp]

Tony. Not to answer your question about tickets; Tim is definitely taking care of that. But I've been in the phone/telecom/IT/voip business for a long time. A suggestion if you haven't already done this for troubleshooting.

If you can, disconnect your entire home network. I.e. all computers, all routers, all switches, all printers, everything. When done disconnecting it, try ONLY your voip adapter and your DSL/Cable/Whatever internet modem/adapter. Experiment with making as many calls as you can. If the problem is still there, it's either your voip adapter or your internet provider. (Or, if you're using the DSL/Cable modem also as your router, it could be that). If the problem goes away, then it's something in your network. E.g. another device causing bandwidth issues; conflict with ports; etc...

I always suggest when having a voip quality problem, to start at the very basic configuration which is the voip adapter and internet connection. No network at all. This way you can see which direction the problem is. Good luck.

[tttony]

Mike,
Great ideas. I've tried pretty much everything. I had pretty much everything isolated and was still experiencing strange line noise, dropped calls, etc.. Once things weren't adding up for me I decided to try a different ATA. So far, so good. Crystal clear. I'm just not sure why this wasn't offered up as a potential solution sooner. It could have saved us so much time and aggravation.

Thanks for your input everyone. I really appreciate it.

[ddodell]

What ATA did you switch to?

Mike,
Great ideas. I've tried pretty much everything. I had pretty much everything isolated and was still experiencing strange line noise, dropped calls, etc.. Once things weren't adding up for me I decided to try a different ATA. So far, so good. Crystal clear. I'm just not sure why this wasn't offered up as a potential solution sooner. It could have saved us so much time and aggravation.

Thanks for your input everyone. I really appreciate it.

[tttony]

What ATA did you switch to?

I am using the OBi202 since I wanted to have access to the second line. It's not something I use often, but occasionally it comes in handy. Especially with two of us working remote.

And for the record, it's running flawlessly on the house wiring since the switch. I'm convinced the GrandStream is an underperforming piece of junk and BYOD is most certainly the way to go. I'm only sorry I didn't figure that out a lot sooner. Hopefully it's smooth sailing from here on out.

[Ansextra]

I am using the OBi202 since I wanted to have access to the second line. It's not something I use often, but occasionally it comes in handy. Especially with two of us working remote.

And for the record, it's running flawlessly on the house wiring since the switch. I'm convinced the GrandStream is an underperforming piece of junk and BYOD is most certainly the way to go. I'm only sorry I didn't figure that out a lot sooner. Hopefully it's smooth sailing from here on out.

I also have 2 lines on two separate Grandstreams here. Will the Obi202 allow me to plug both lines into one box and not interfere with each other? I have an Obi 100 that I don't use any more since switching to VOIPO a year ago but this sounds like it may be a good solution for me and save an outlet as well as a router port.

[MisterEd]

I am using the OBi202 since I wanted to have access to the second line. It's not something I use often, but occasionally it comes in handy. Especially with two of us working remote.

And for the record, it's running flawlessly on the house wiring since the switch. I'm convinced the GrandStream is an underperforming piece of junk and BYOD is most certainly the way to go. I'm only sorry I didn't figure that out a lot sooner. Hopefully it's smooth sailing from here on out.

Hmmm, I have 2 independent lines (2 numbers) on my Voipo Grandstream. I do have some occasional problems with dialing out and getting dead air but not a lot and usually to toll free numbers but not (yet) to any "important" numbers. I'd LOVE not being able to make or get calls to my sister though without actually doing it on purpose!

[ymhee_bcex]

@tttony, My guess that about 80-90% of the issues are either customer errors or easy to fix. These tickets get resolved by support quite quickly. Another 10-20% are issues outside support control (limitations of VOIPo service; limitations of underlying carriers; compatibility issues, or something really bad with customer ISP). Being a super low-cost provider, I suppose VOIPo doesn't have resources to do enterprise-level troubleshooting without going out of business. So, if you are in those 10-20%, your best bet is indeed to move on. Depending on your technical skills your options range from bundling phone service with internet from ISP to no-cost no-support service such as Google Voice.

I have three accounts that I am very happy with (I just renewed one of them for another two years as part of Black Friday promotion), and one account in that 10-20% category. By the way, VOIPo was very helpful in crediting remaining months to remaining account. I switched my very non-technical in-laws to Google Voice, and they haven't had a problem in two years.

[rainsux]

BYOD was part of my problem. It worked fine for years - during the long 'beta. But once BYOD went mainstream, my service went to hell.

My problem; (incoming calls having no audio), has finally been mitigated, by moving me to different SIP server. It's not a new/unknown problem. But it took multiple weeks to re-home me to another SIP server. Too. Damn. Long. Frankly; I had given up hope and the begun to shift to GV.

Based on my experience, I am no longer able to recommend VoIPO to others ... and I used to be a vocal supporter.

[VOIPoTim]

BYOD was part of my problem. It worked fine for years - during the long 'beta. But once BYOD went mainstream, my service went to hell.

My problem; (incoming calls having no audio), has finally been mitigated, by moving me to different SIP server. It's not a new/unknown problem. But it took multiple weeks to re-home me to another SIP server. Too. Damn. Long. Frankly; I had given up hope and the begun to shift to GV.

Based on my experience, I am no longer able to recommend VoIPO to others ... and I used to be a vocal supporter.

Sorry to hear about this.

Can you e-mail your account info to me at tim @ voipo.com so I can review this?

This is very interesting. One thing that stands out is that you say it was fixed when you were moved to another BYOD server. There is one big config difference in that other server and that is that it handles its own audio so any audio streams coming to you would come from the same IP address that you're connecting to whereas with our core servers, the media is distributed to dedicated media servers.

It's interesting that that solved your issue and leads me to wonder if we should look into that more and see if it was solved because the IP of the media was the same IP you were already interacting with vs the router blocking an audio stream from a different IP.

Please e-mail me your info so I can have our guys look into this....this could be a very interesting test case that we could learn from.

[chpalmer]

router blocking

You SOHO guys drive me nuts!

Its the built in firewall on the router blocking.