Time Warner Internet issues anyone?

I’m in the greater Milwaukee area and have found that Time Warner connections, whether they’re the much more expensive business accounts or the residential accounts, struggle to support VOIP conversations. This has been a problem for over a year now.

I’ve been using an app called PingPlotter Pro for some time now, to monitor the Internet connections of clients using VOIP phones. Basically it pings an address and records the response time, lost packets, and charts things including a computation of jitter. It actually produces a chart that is a highly accurate depiction of how phone call quality. That is, when someone calls complaining that they’re getting chop, I pull-up PPP and see right away that jitter is through the roof and see 2-3% packet loss, on their circuit.

I use AT&T U-Verse (45x6) and have no problem with my VOIP, nor do most of my clients on AT&T. I also have clients in other markets where they have Comcast and they are not having these issues. I have clients with remote offices on Comcast and a main office on an AT&T twelve-by-something and everything works great (QoS is a savior).

Time Warner has indicated my PPP test is invalid because I’m on AT&T and they don’t peer with AT&T, things route through XO. And, because they don’t prioritize the pings. BUT, I’ve even run PPP on a Time Warner business circuit, pinging a Time Warner residential circuit, and my graphs there look nearly identical to what I see from my AT&T circuit. And the graphs are an accurate depiction of call quality, it isn’t as if the PPP graphs are always terrible, sometimes they’re decent and call quality is decent, too.

So have you guys had any luck with Time Warner? I have a couple of clients that can’t get anything but, they’d happily change carriers but there is nothing else available. It is sort of a sad state of affairs.

Advice or guidance would be welcome.

Oh, footnote sorta: I have a conference call coming up w/ Time Warner next Tuesday afternoon. Time Warner now provides SIP trunks and apparently if you take their minimum six channels, they install a separate modem for that circuit. And I imagine they use QoS on their network to guarantee call quality (as much as they can). But the purpose of the conference call is for me to figure out how remote phones are accommodated in that case. Oh well, I’m talking too much now.

Love my FreePBX on AT&T U-Verse. Rock solid.

Coincidentally / sort of related… I host a few PBXes with CyberLynk out of Milwaukee… about less than an hour ago, I lost connectivity to their datacenter across Comcast for about 8 minutes… however another site using Level3 stayed connected throughout. I’m in Texas.
Must be something in the area.

We use an old Asterisk 1.8 system on a Time Warner Circuit and it is horrible. All of our remote extension experience a half of dozen drop outs every phone call (30-60 min). We just put a system on our XO circuit and it has been a dream compared to Time Warner.

Supposedly, and I heard this info second hand so I don’t know exactly how accurate it is but one of my people called and said that by default, the crappy “business class” router they provided has SIP ALG turned on and only they can turn it off from their backdoor into your router. We had it turned off and we thought it help but it still sucks. This is on a server not an endpoint.