Anyone using VoIP through Virgin Media? Your comments please

Hello,

I would like to hear from people having broadband form Virgin Media and are using heavily VoIP (i.e running their own IP PBX inside their houses or offices)

a) What line do you have? Fibre? What speed?
b) How many concurrent voip channels do you usually occupy? Are you still happy with it?
c) Are you using compression g729 codecs for this communication?
d) Any problems?

Anyone interested to share his experieces is most welcome!
Thank you

Virgin Media's consumer service often has complaints of over-utilisation, excessive jitter and packet loss at peak times - precisely the things you don't want for VoIP. This is in part down to the shared upstream channels inherent in a cable modem system - heavy users can saturate these channels.

If Virgin Media run their business cable modems on separate channels, this might be less troublesome. Overall, UK DSL users seem to report fewer problems with jitter and packet loss than cable modem users.


You may get a better feeling if you ask for pingtest.net results or results from one of the SIP simulation sites in the Virgin Media (Cable) forum, though this will be an unscientific survey as the results will vary according to time, location and package subscribed to.

Virgin Media have a really weird history with VoIP in general. Their SuperHub 1 (after an update back end of 2012) broke VoIP spectacularly for a number of users (lack of registration).

Turns out the SH1 had a SIP ALG which couldn't be disabled and it really messed with the messaging.

Their new SH2 does work nicely, however running the pingtests and (if you can find one) a Broadband Quality Test at various times of the day will give you a good indication of what to expect in terms of latency and jitter.

That being said, a VM Cable BB can (and does) support multiple G.711a/u calls (remember these are approximately 80-100K per call (streaming)) and probably just under double that for G.729A/B (which is between 50-80K per stream).

If you have a SH1, look on the VM Help & Support to turn it to Modem Only mode and grab yourself an ethernet WAN router - something like a Draytek for example, but do check with your chosen provider for compatibility first!