Flux gate question

It has happened quite regularly there:

Here is plowing the American way:

Sometimes it's really tough:

It still happens up north but it's nice to see that the spirit of helping thy neighbor always seems to come through in such situations:

train here.

I was surprised how calm the Belgian passenger reacted, usually the guys south of your border can be a lot more "to the point" when it comes to something they ain't so pleased about.

Yup, seems they have a major screw-up in the design of the A/C systems. Above a certain temperature they appeared to simply quit.

area.

In Europe there are two other problems: EE pay is declining, so no motivation from that side. Then they often kick out older engineers, old as in "anything above 40". That has begun to backfire, majorly.

works.

Tell me about it, this &%#@!! VoIP junk. It happens almost weekly now that I have to interrupt a client because I can't understand them anymore. To many missing parts in sentences. Then they call me from their cell phone and all is well.

It's pathetic: Here were were in a conference call and the VoIP croaked. As usual. Then a guy whipped out his little cell phone, switched it to hands-free and put it in the middle of the conference table. Now things finally worked. Not all new technology should be embraced, and VoIP most certainly not. At least not until it's really ready.

train here.

area.

works.

That should tell you something about those operating the services you pay for to make that VoIP to go from one place to another. I think it's more than mere coincidence that things like that happen, specially when your ISP also supports phone services and keeps trying to get you to buy into it.

You don't really think your ISP likes those free VoIP services do you? Well free from their point of view.

Jamie

This has nothing to do with an ISP. It's enterprise VoIP systems from big companies, those that usually also supply the phones and the other hardware. I have had stuff like that happen even while within campus, where the signals never entered the world outside the company.

The ISP is largely out of the loop anyhow as far as telephony is concerned. Many people use their flat rate cell for just about all calls. In my case Missy Bell just gets to collect for the basic phone service. LD and international is via other companies. I gave them the option to drop to 2-3c for domestic and Western Europe like the others. Instead they went from 10c to 11c, then 12c, then ... and ... *thwock* ... I pulled the plug on their LD plan. The guy at their retention department couldn't believe it.

"Jamie" wrote in message news:uaVRs.250671$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe21.iad...

They've already called *twice this month* offering package deals. More than double what I'm paying now for services I'm not interested in? Sure!

Tim

Check if your office router has QoS (Quality of Service) enabled. That gives priority to time critical packets, such as VoIP and reserves bandwidth for these packets so that non-time critical services, such as email and web browsing, does not kill the VoIP. QoS has to be configured for your particular mutation of VoIP (Skype, SIP, H.323, etc).

Run a VoIP tester to see how well you're doing.

It's not my office, it's at clients. They have rather expensive systems where I am sure the (large) vendor has done all this. It just ain't cutting it, POTS performs better.

I would never install VoIP in my office. With web conferencing we always have a POTS audio-conference running alongside because those generally work.

Interesting. Is there some sort of country-wide campaign going on? Yesterday AT&T called and wanted to know if we needed TV service. "Thanks, we just use the antenna" ... "WHAT?"

Hmm, I'm never called. ;-) If AT&T would provide the service, perhaps I'd pay for it. Satellite sucks (though DTV somewhat less than DISH).

I've got phone and Internet through them so sometimes there is a sales call. But they are good about it, they don't bug us more than 1-2 times a year which is ok.

As for TV, that ranks very low on the food chain in this here house. Since that dreaded switch to digital TV most movies pixel out halfway through it. So we tape just about everything and that ain't much. Only upside with digital was that Ch 58-2 showed up (called "THIS" TV). They've got the occasional good classic, and after 2-4 taping attempts it often sticks. Other than that we buy old movies from the local thrift store, we just don't like this modern brutality stuff.

I get calls from XM wanting me back but that's not happening unless we buy a car with the radio. XM was worthwhile but Internet radio is better.

Just the opposite, here. It's number one on SWMBO's maintenance needs. ;-) I watch a couple of hours a night, though. LOS is one of the biggest reasons I'd never go OTA. I'd never hear the end of it. As far classics go, there are several channels with the stuff on the cable and satellite services. There are some I watch but it's mostly her TV. I'm going to put one up in my "office" some day but I have to run a coax from the basement, which probably means sheetrock work.

"Assumption, the mother of all screwups".

I've seen overpriced and complicated systems that were misconfigured. This stuff is not easy. For VoIP, you have to reserve both downstream and upstream bandwidth. One big office system that I looked at had the proper incoming bandwidth reserved with QoS. However, there was no reserved outgoing bandwidth. The result was that VoIP calls would be heard at the office, but the other end had difficulties hearing anyone from the office. It took a bit effort, but it worked well after that was fixed.

Another system would work perfectly when nobody was in the office, but fail badly during the day. The major culprits were several security IP camera servers, which hogged ALL the upstream bandwidth when active. Because the security cameras also have a UDP audio channel, it looks like outgoing VoIP traffic to the main router. QoS was working, but with all the cameras spewing audio, the upstream reserved bandwidth was saturated. An update to the camera server software allowed control of the audio path, and some setting tweaks, solved the problem.

I realize that it's not your system or your problem, but it might be worthwhile giving them a clue as to what might be happening. What I do is sniff the router traffic to see what type of packets are moving. Last month, I had a customer with a remote office and a VPN (via relatively slow bonded DSL lines), that was downloading videos through the VPN instead going direct via the local internet connection. Anyway, there are plenty of ways to break a network, even if QoS is properly configured.

If this is too much, try the VoIP test at their offices while uploading a large file through their system. If the numbers are unchanged with and without the upload, QoS is working. If the VoIP test fails with the upload, it's time to have them talk to their IT provider: How to interpret the graphs:

D'VersiBIT®

We have had a Vonage line for years now. It carries my '800' number for us. When we first moved in, the service over my cable internet was terrible. We would have drop outs of several seconds every few minutes, so we finally opted to put in a POTS line. When the cable company finally got around to offering their own VoIP service, they had to replace all their routers and other equipment in the local office to cure the problem. By that time, we were on DSL...

A properly designed system is able to automatically flag that and automatically send an alert to maintenance, stating how many outgoing cut-outs happened and how bad they were. If the system can't do that then it's a bad system.

Again, must be flagged automatically. With exact timestamps.

Well, they are usually hundreds or thousands of miles away. And the guys on the other end of the line have no time to mess with telco stuff, they are tasked with designing hardware and software. The telco just has to work. POTS and PBXes do work, VoIP often doesn't. So ... :-)

Design of the network and setup seems to be the key.. I've got a small VOIP system (a few lines) plus a legacy POTS line for 911 and fax. A client has a larger system with 50+ phones. It's properly designed (perhaps a bit conservatively) with a completely separate network for the POE IP phones and redundant WAN connections combining the data and voice, centrally adminstered "provisioning", QOS etc.

Although I can tell the difference in quality between POTS and (properly set up) VOIP, I've never had trouble with fidelity- it's consistent and better than a cell phone. It's also important to use a good quality phone (I am familiar with Polycom and Cisco, but there are some cheap ones out there).

It's possible some locations just don't have the latency and bandwidth available for good VOIP service without adding microwave links or stuff like that.

I get the impression that there are a LOT of office LAN setups that are sub-optimal too, just people don't complain as much about slow file transfers, stalling, corruption of files saved over the networks, backups that don't work (well, they'll complain bitterly about that one, but then it's too late) etc.

All true, but in the end it seems not to be worth it. If you want a dedicated LAN just for VoIP why do it in the first place? It means tons of new cable runs, jackhammers, dirt, dust.

I prefer to keep things simple. This is why I still have a little PBX cabinet for POTS lines sitting in the garage that I was often tempted to put into the E-waste container. But I am going to keep it until at least semi-retired, where I am absolutely sure I won't need it. Would only be needed if I had employees and the way politics go in California that's not likely at all anymore, so maybe I really don't need this box. I do not trust leftists and I do not trust VoIP :-)

on

Did my link help any?

Marion County, Fl. switched to all VOIP about 10 years ago for all county offices. It worked well, even through several years of high hurricane activity.