Information sent across the internet is split into small units called packets. This applies to all types of data -- email, web pages, voice calls, streaming video, etc.
Packet loss occurs when one or more packets of data are lost or fail to reach their destination. This can occur due to a variety of reasons such as network congestion, faulty hardware, or physical interference.
For a home network, packet loss can have a significant impact on the overall user experience. For instance, if packets are lost while streaming video, the video quality may become poor and may even freeze. Similarly, packet loss during online gaming can result in players experiencing lag and an overall degradation of the gaming experience. In some cases, packet loss may even cause the complete failure of a connection, resulting in a complete outage.
In this post, we explore the common reasons people have issues with their VoIP service. We also provide some troubleshooting tips and educational information about the problems and their solutions.
There are three main factors that can contribute to issues with VoIP:
Networking issues in your home or office;
Phone and voice quality; and
Internet connectivity.
I just finished reading a blog post titled "VoIP Spear: Monitoring and Cutting To the Heart of Your VoIP Problems" by Innovation Sask. It provides a great overview of VoIP Spear.
It's so nice to see a write up about VoIP Spear that makes it easy to understand what we do. VoIP Spear, at its core, is very technical and this means it's important to clearly explain what it is and how it works. Our last blog post was titled "What is VoIP Spear?" for this very reason.
Customers shouldn't need to be hardcore geeks in order to understand how VoIP Spear can benefit them. This is ultimately why we started VoIP Spear in the first place -- to provide an easier and more accessible way to do VoIP quality monitoring.
Innovation Sask's post also mentions our new Sentries. These are small hardware devices, about the size of a computer mouse, that monitor the quality of your internet connection 24x7x365. They essentially do the same thing as VoIP Spear's all-software solution, except that they're hardware devices you install onto your network. The Sentries provide an advantage in that they are able to monitor from inside your network so they have more visibility to certain classes of problems. The Sentries are small and easy to install, requiring only an internet connection and power.
I'd like to thanks the folks at Innovation Sask for highlighting VoIP Spear. It's a real honour.
VoIP Spear is a web service that assists when you’re having voice quality issues on your phone calls. We monitor your internet connection and track the reasons your problems occurred.
VoIP Spear has been operating for more than 12 years and has helped tens of thousands of users with their voice quality issues.
The internet is a packet-based network system, meaning that it splits data up into thousands of small chunks called packets. Most of the time, the internet performs well and the packets reach their destination properly, however sometimes that isn’t the case.
Services like email and web traffic have mechanisms to deal with imperfections with the internet connection. Unfortunately, voice calls are extremely sensitive to these issues and this is what causes your frustration.
A while back, I noticed a nice little feature about VoIP Spear at VoIP Resources. It's flattering to see a positive review like this.
We're especially pleased that the author of the article really seems to get VoIP Spear. She starts off by describing VoIP QoS problems at a high level. When VoIP Spear is introduced as a tool, the article mentions that one advantage is that it is "no-client side". This is a subtle point that is easy to overlook -- there's no software to install. You can just enter your IP address into the VoIP Spear web site and it will start its monitoring.
The article also mentions that you can view your VoIP QoS results in a chart or table format, and that there are several options with regards to our account packages. About the only the article gets wrong is when it mentions that VoIP Spear servers run tests to the endpoints every 5 minutes. In fact, our servers monitor the endpoints every 1 minute.
In any case, thanks for the great article, Lauren.
