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

The way I did it was to change the assignment in my DHCP server. When you reserve an IP address for it, you can also specify which DNS servers are allocated.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

The way I did it was to change the assignment in my DHCP server. When you reserve an IP address for it, you can also specify which DNS servers are allocated.

thanks, i'll check out my router manual and see if i can use my overplay vpn DNS (uk based) instead of the [censored] talktalk DNS

I'll use pingtest... didn't know it even existed

My current result is http://www.pingtest.net/result/74259873.png which shows as excellent!

Will re-test when it is broken again...

I suspect that even though ping results maybe fine there is something else going on as I am sure many other people with different ISPs have bad latency at peak times but not enough to make it unusable..

Why would Vodafone mention Virgin Media specifically in the official troubleshooting forum post at http://forum.vodafone.co.uk/t5/Vodafone-Sure-Signal/...?

In reply to a post by TopDog:

Why would Vodafone mention Virgin Media specifically in the official troubleshooting forum post at http://forum.vodafone.co.uk/t5/Vodafone-Sure-Signal/...?

Virgin Media, due to the nature of the cable network, have the worst jitter of any major ISP.

I see it's fixed

For your Sure Signal to work, the minimum upload speed needed is 300kbps. From the information you�ve given, it would appear that you�re getting upload speeds between 250kbps and 350 kbps. Once it drops below 300kbps then the connection would drop and your Sure Signal would show the solid power light only.



I�d recommend you contact your ISP to see if there�s anyway in which they can assist you.

I'll certainly look into this.

However once the initial IP lookup is done the result is cached for a period of time so not sure how this would help significantly. The Sure Signal box talks to the below specific IP's/range so once the initial look up is done it won't re query the DNS server for a period of time.

212.183.133.181
212.183.133.182
212.183.131.128/26

I am re-running a DNS benchmark right now.. been a while since I last checked what was the fastest for me.. will let you know the results later

yeah wait for it to break or at least test after 6pm.

I think ignition has gave you the right diagnosis.

In reply to a post by TopDog:

The Sure Signal box talks to the below specific IP's/range so once the initial look up is done it won't re query the DNS server for a period of time.

212.183.133.181
212.183.133.182
212.183.131.128/26

I've also observed Sure Signal using 212.183.133.180 and 88.82.13.169 to 88.82.13.174. If you want that latter block of addresses as a CIDR range, 88.82.13.168/29 will cover it (that's slightly wider than necessary, covering .168 to .175).

Vodafone's out of date documentation mentions 212.183.133.177 to 212.183.133.179. I'd include those in your configuration for completeness.

Can someone please confirm whether if a device like Vodafone Sure Signal is used, do calls and internet traffic now route through your broadband just like VOIP e.g. Vonage?

I want to get a Sure signal to use in the office but I am wondering whether my surfing on the iphone will be detected by my corporate IT network guys. Both tech support and Vodafone and the shop say that it wont go through the corporate network but that doesnt make any sense to me, how else will this service work?

It all depends on how the SureSignal tunnels the traffic, which I don't know the answer too.

The tunnel would go through the corporate network, but as its a tunnel if encrypted what you are doing on it should not be visible. Just like a VPN really.

As Mr Saffron says I too imagine it is done the same way Fon is done - some sort of VPN tunnel and if surfing the phone will get an IP from the phone provider and use their DNS so all that would show on the host network is traffic to the phone provider with no clue as to what it was.

All traffic from a Sure Signal passes through an encrypted IPSec NAT-T tunnel - all the corporate network will see is a load of encrypted data on UDP port 4500.

The only way the corporate network will see your iPhone usage is if you connect the phone to a corporate Wi-Fi access point.

Thanks to everyone who has responded to my question.

Can I just ask how exactly we know that it is going through a VPN, I mean is it quoted anywhere on the vodafone or Alcatel-Lucent's (manufacturer of the Sure Signal device) website?

Also is there an equivalent device for the other major networks like O2, Orange, T-mobile.

Edited by deleted (Sat 19-Jan-13 22:22:47)

http://www.vodafone.co.uk/cs/groups/public/documents...

I've got traffic snooping facilities on my network, and, apart from DHCP, DNS and NTP, the only traffic from my Sure Signal (the older Sagem type) is to an IPsec NAT-T VPN, as I detailed in my earlier reply. It's certainly a bunch of UDP port 4500 packets, which have the correct outer layers for this type of VPN - the payload is, of course, encrypted.

The generic name for this technology is a femtocell. I believe 3 sometimes offer them on a case by case basis to customers with coverage problems. I don't believe the other networks offer them to retail customers.