I am pretty new to FreePBX and phone systems in general so looking for some guidance. We are running FreePBX 12.0.76.2 offsite provided by a third party. There are times that I cannot get answers when we have QOS issues like dropped calls or calls that break up. A lot of this has been resolved by cleaning and speeding up our internet connection. There are still times that we have issues and I would like to see if there are tools or modules that would help pinpoint the problems source. The only tool that I am currently using for this is Endpoint manager -> Extension mapping to see if the response times of the phones are below 100ms. Usually during these time there are a few phones that are over 1000ms. I am eager to learn so if you can point me to the best place to get educated on this that also would be appreciated.
What up/down speeds do you have on your internet connection (speedtest.net or similar)?
Is it a single connection or do you have a multi-WAN router?
What router make/model do you have?
What QoS settings do you have in the router?
Are you confident the problems are not within your own LAN?
Do you have SIP ALG switched OFF in the router?
How many simultaneous internal/external active calls?
How many phones? Makes/models?
Do the call problems occur with specific phones only?
What switches do you have between the phones and the router?
What codec are you using?
There’s very little “magic” about QoS - it’s really just a “weighting” system to determine which packets get preference IF AND WHEN the pipe gets busy. So the first task is to know exactly how busy your connection is getting - a good router should have the tools built in to help you with that. My Draytek 2960’s also show me dynamic bar charts of low/normal/medium/high priority traffic, as a way of verifying that the QoS settings are appropriate.
Depending on your non-VoIP traffic, it may be worth installing a second internet connection dedicated to voice traffic, using a dual-WAN router to direct the traffic.
BTW: Looks like Chrome disabled Java in latest Chrome versions, so had to use Firefox instead to run the test
In the past I have had problems with ISPs, I would do a speedtest over at speedtest.net, and the upload and download speeds were great, way more than I needed for a few VoIP calls.
BUT speedtest.net does not test the QUALITY of that upload and download speed. Phone Power’s speedtest tests for jitter and delays. Great upload and download speeds dont matter if there are little hiccups in the connection like delays, dropped packets, it will mess up VoIP calls, and can only be fixed by the ISP
Run the phone power test at your office location, I doubt the FreePBX has a shitty internet connection if it is in a data center, it is more likely your office connection that is the problem. Run the test a few times to see what you get. If you find your internet connection is not quality enough for VoIP, you will have to complain to your ISP
Here are the results of my test (VoIP quality is excellent here):
Test Type: Voice over IP
Downstream Jitter: 2.3 ms
Downstream Loss: 0 %
Downstream Packet Order: 100 %
Upstream Jitter: 3.1 ms
Upstream Loss: 0 %
Upstream Packet Order: 100.0 %
Packet Discards: 0 %
MOS Score: 4.2
I’ve been using http://myspeed.visualware.com/test.php myself - it appears to be a slightly more flexible/thorough implementation of the same Java applet. However, I was keeping that one up my sleeve since, IME, it’s easy to obsess with that kind of test (which will produce, in most cases, a different result every time you run it) without having examined “the basics” first.
Well - some good gear there, and no obvious problems jumping out at me. PfSense has all the tools you’ll need built right in to it (or installable). Plus, instead of QoS, it has “traffic shaping”. It doesn’t do any SIP ALG (by default) so no worries there.
Thanks for looking at that and offering ideas on how to test the connection. I know now that I have a good foundation to work with and need to learn more about freePBX and PFSense.
