asked on

Nuvio VoIP with Linksys befsr81

hi, my client has been through a lot of crap with their previous tech and his Nuvio phone setups. The phones 'work' but the voice is kind of choppy or grainy at times. i've checked with Nuvio and they suggest the Linksys BEFSR81 router and configuring it with QoS. I've seen reviews and in general i like Linksys but I'm wondering what you guys might think of this scenario and if you can give suggestions to bring me close to success--it's just that the client got screwed over by previous techs who never finished the job, so I don't want to sell her on this router working if she's still gonna have fuzzy communications.

I have checked the bandwidth onsite and it seems fine. The internet works fine and is fast there also.

They are using 4 Polycom phones with the Nuvio nPBX service.

They also use SBC DSL, is this a problem with only 4 phones?

thanks!
goldy

SOLUTION

grblades

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

SOLUTION

shepimport

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

goldylamont

ASKER

grblades, i will try out the winmtr program you specified...would ethereal work for this purpose? I'm just getting into network diagnostic tools and am looking for a nice, Free!, one.

shepimport, this d-link sounds like the answer to my dreams...would this mean that there would be no need for me to get the linksys at all? just keep the current 2Wire router in place and stick this inbetween and voila, no more crackly voice? i'd sure like to try it out if this is true--however, since you have experience with Nuvio, has it been more positive or negative? why do they recommend these linksys routers if they don't do ANY good? i've seen you post a lot in the VoIP area...so i know you know your stuff mang!

thanks guys, all comments/advice appreciated and i'm fair and quick with the point givin's!!

goldy

grblades

winmtr (mtr is the linux equivilent) pings every router on the route to the destination so it is very good at identifying packet loss and exactly where it is occuring.
ethereal is a network analyser and a very good one in my opinion
I also use MRTG (standard in stall on most linux installations) which is a SNMP tool which will graph bandwidth usage and produce html reports. I run it against our switch which connects to our firewalls and servers.
Nagios is a good monitoring tool.

shepimport

You don't need to do all that testing... you know what the problem is... without QOS your data packets are messing with your voice packets.. perioid... Before d-link came out there was no true soho solution... so.. Nuvio believes in best effort... they are just inbetween a rock and a hard place.

You can put the dlink device before any router... as long as the router is not doing a pppoe connection to the dsl modem....

just so u know... a lot of VoIP companies just run a second DSL circut for voice ... to save money on the QOS device...

You should be all set for 70 dollars.. I would be surprised if it did work on such few phones... make sure u do a firmware update on it when u get it.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

grblades

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

shepimport

"The phones 'work' but the voice is kind of choppy or grainy at times."

We prefer to KISS.. Keep it simple... this is the easiest solution and the most likely...

Also I know for fact voila works fine with VoIP... they run thier own broadsoft server also...

goldylamont

ASKER

shepimport, i'm going most likely try out your suggestion for the d-link. even though i could be getting packet loss from a server between here and Nuvio, I do agree with your Keep it Simple philosophy. However...

grblades, i just ran winmtr on both the Nuvio server and our SBC DSL server with the results posted below. It looks like some router in the middle of San Jose is dropping 63% of our packets? Am I reading this correctly? And if this is true, what ramifications would this have on our VoIP? because if this is true, then that would mean that hundreds of businesses in our area couldn't have reliable VoIP since many of them use SBC DSL. is that what this readout is saying?

I'll be trying out these suggestions next week at the site. So, if you have any other suggestions I'm all ears. Don't trip, you've both helped me out a lot so the points are well reserved, but i will wait until i finish the project to PAQ this question so that I can post up the results etc.

thanks guys!
goldy

NUVIO SERVER, SHOWS LOSS ON SAN JOSE SERVER car4 (plcm.nuvio.com : 63.251.33.163)
|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| home - 0 | 84 | 84 | 0 | 25 | 32 | 31 |
| 10.20.30.40 - 0 | 84 | 84 | 0 | 14 | 31 | 16 |
| dist4-vlan60.pltn13.pbi.net - 2 | 84 | 83 | 0 | 12 | 94 | 16 |
| bb2-10g2-0.pltnca.sbcglobal.net - 0 | 84 | 84 | 0 | 28 | 235 | 140 |
| bb1-p10-0.pltnca.sbcglobal.net - 0 | 84 | 84 | 0 | 30 | 296 | 15 |
| bb1-p4-0.crsfca.sbcglobal.net - 0 | 84 | 84 | 15 | 29 | 312 | 15 |
| ex1-p3-0.eqsjca.sbcglobal.net - 0 | 84 | 84 | 15 | 30 | 203 | 16 |
| ge-6-13.car4.SanJose1.Level3.net - 61 | 84 | 33 | 15 | 26 | 234 | 16 |
| ae-32-56.ebr2.SanJose1.Level3.net - 0 | 84 | 84 | 15 | 17 | 32 | 16 |
| ae-1.ebr1.SanJose1.Level3.net - 2 | 84 | 83 | 15 | 20 | 281 | 15 |
| ae-2.ebr1.LosAngeles1.Level3.net - 5 | 83 | 79 | 15 | 26 | 219 | 31 |
| ae-1.ebr2.LosAngeles1.Level3.net - 16 | 83 | 69 | 15 | 31 | 125 | 16 |
| ae-3.ebr2.Dallas1.Level3.net - 26 | 83 | 62 | 63 | 99 | 375 | 94 |
| ae-21-56.car1.Dallas1.Level3.net - 0 | 83 | 83 | 47 | 98 | 282 | 94 |
| unknown.Level3.net - 0 | 83 | 83 | 46 | 78 | 219 | 94 |
| border4.ge3-1-bbnnet1.ext1.dal.pnap.net - 0 | 83 | 83 | 47 | 93 | 234 | 93 |
| nuviocorp-2.border4.ext1.dal.pnap.net - 0 | 83 | 83 | 46 | 90 | 94 | 94 |
| ns1.nuvio.com - 0 | 83 | 83 | 46 | 85 | 94 | 94 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
WinMTR - 0.8. Copyleft @2000-2002 Vasile Laurentiu Stanimir ( stanimir@cr.nivis.com )

SBC DSL SERVER 75.12.75.142 (SHOWS ZERO LOSS)
|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| home - 0 | 6 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 10.20.30.40 - 0 | 6 | 6 | 0 | 10 | 16 | 16 |
| dist4-vlan60.pltn13.pbi.net - 0 | 6 | 6 | 15 | 15 | 16 | 16 |
| bb2-g3-0.pltnca.sbcglobal.net - 0 | 6 | 6 | 16 | 78 | 219 | 16 |
| bb1-p9-0.pltnca.sbcglobal.net - 0 | 6 | 6 | 15 | 23 | 47 | 16 |
| bb1-p4-0.crsfca.sbcglobal.net - 0 | 6 | 6 | 15 | 23 | 47 | 16 |
| ex1-p14-0.eqsjca.sbcglobal.net - 0 | 6 | 6 | 15 | 21 | 32 | 15 |
| sl-st20-sj-0-0.sprintlink.net - 0 | 6 | 6 | 15 | 23 | 47 | 15 |
| sl-bb21-sj-9-0.sprintlink.net - 0 | 6 | 6 | 15 | 88 | 219 | 63 |
| sl-bb23-sj-13-0.sprintlink.net - 0 | 6 | 6 | 15 | 21 | 32 | 31 |
| sl-bb22-stk-13-0.sprintlink.net - 0 | 6 | 6 | 47 | 78 | 125 | 62 |
| sl-bb21-che-2-0.sprintlink.net - 0 | 6 | 6 | 47 | 65 | 78 | 78 |
| sl-bb20-che-15-0.sprintlink.net - 0 | 6 | 6 | 47 | 62 | 78 | 47 |
| sl-bb24-chi-3-0.sprintlink.net - 0 | 6 | 6 | 62 | 80 | 109 | 109 |
| sl-bb23-chi-14-0.sprintlink.net - 0 | 6 | 6 | 78 | 85 | 94 | 94 |
| sl-bb20-chi-8-0.sprintlink.net - 0 | 6 | 6 | 78 | 91 | 109 | 109 |
| sl-bb20-spr-10-0.sprintlink.net - 0 | 6 | 5 | 78 | 90 | 94 | 94 |
| 144.232.21.77 - 0 | 5 | 5 | 78 | 106 | 141 | 141 |
| sl-oxfor2-2-0.sprintlink.net - 0 | 5 | 5 | 78 | 156 | 375 | 125 |
| 72.12.93.238 - 0 | 5 | 5 | 78 | 147 | 359 | 94 |
| No response from host - 100 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
WinMTR - 0.8. Copyleft @2000-2002 Vasile Laurentiu Stanimir ( stanimir@cr.nivis.com )

SOLUTION

grblades

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

goldylamont

ASKER

ok, so i found a linksys router just sitting in the client's IT office so i decided to install it with QoS to see what would happen. It didn't fix the problem. So I contacted Nuvio and requested a refund. I'm still waiting to see the terms of the refund but hopefully they will come through. I spoke to a tech there and he told me in some locations that voice quality just sucked and that I had done all that they could suggest about the situation.

shepimport, i was going to purchase the QoS router you recommended until i found the Linksys and didn't want to charge the client any more (as they've already been through 3 routers) without being 100% sure that things would work out. but i'll keep this in mind for future setups.

grblades, the WinMTR program is great. thanks for suggesting it. although we're scrapping VoIP for this project i will be using this program in the future. and its free!

thanks guys,
kamal