Vodafone Sure Signal box on Virgin Media is useless

Was wondering if anyone here is running a Vodafone Sure Signal box on their Virgin Cable connection.

My sure signal was running beautifully up until I joined Virgin and now it useless because although I can hear the other caller perfectly I sound terrible. This is with various different phones.

Vodafone acknowledge the issue and say it is problem specific to Virgin Media customers as mentioned at the top of this note.

It is causing enough of a problem for me to want to leave Virgin although I know Vodafone should be able to provide a decent signal WITHOUT the Femto cell in my house. I did love it when it was working because it gave land line quality phone calls through the mobile.

I believe the problem is down a network problem on the Virgin side but not sure what. I am on a 50mb connection with 5mb upload speed and even though I get these results with a speedtester I still have poor call quality.

Anyone else had similar issues and have any suggestions?

Thanks,

TD

Edited by TopDog (Thu 20-Dec-12 19:37:11)

jitter, packet loss and suchlike are important parameters for VoIP - try a tester like http://myspeed.visualware.com/indexvoip.php

Suresignal isn't actually VoIP it uses a secure tunnelling method I think, but the above may give you a clue what's going on.

Yarwell, ran the VOIP test on that site and it is reporting good results for VOIP.

Speedtest shows 50mb down and nearly 5mb up... as shown here

Broadband Quality Ping graph however does not show fantastic results...

That's not good but I've certainly seen worse. There was a recent firmware upgrade for the Superhub fixing problems with some VOIP kit so although it isn't VOIP and probably won't help it's probably worth powering yours down and up if it isn't running V2.37.01 firmware - check by clicking http://192.168.0.1/ then the router status button (top right) then Information (do not login).

Try changing the DNS servers on the Suresignal to Google at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

those high ping times might be your issue, leave a voicemail at 0800 and see how that sounds.

I am on V2.37.01 and the router has been rebooted recently.

I am not sure what changing the DNS servers on sure signal box itself can do.. there is no way to do this.. the sure signal box talks to a couple of Vodafone IP address through some sort of VPN tunnel...

Yarwell.. thanks for the tip.. up to now I just been calling myself on the landline ... the problem is that it comes and goes... device seems to be much better during the day and always much worse in the evenings.. just left myself a voicemail at 10am and it sounded perfect.. however it will be worse in the evening.. I will test again through the day... wondering if there is any Virgin can do as I don't believe Vodafone can do anything because of a traffic management problem on the VM side...

In reply to a post by TopDog:

just left myself a voicemail at 10am and it sounded perfect.. however it will be worse in the evening..

It's the same congestion that's causing your quality monitor to look so spiky. VoIP relies on a consistent flow of data while yours is far from solid.

During an evening when it's no good do a pingtest at www.pingtest.net and look at your jitter, it'll probably be bad.

In reply to a post by TopDog:

I am on V2.37.01 and the router has been rebooted recently.

I am not sure what changing the DNS servers on sure signal box itself can do..

Well, it fixed my Suresignal problems.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

Try changing the DNS servers on the Suresignal to Google at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

Perhaps you meant changing DNS servers on the router rather than the Sure Signal box itself? Otherwise i'd love to know how to change the DNS servers on my v2 sure signal box