g729 – A success story

Its almost a month now that I am using this new desi cable net service. So far it is good. After an initial tests I was really happy to see that there was no port blocking like City Cable Network in this service. 

I was able to connect to FWD instantly. However, my cheers were broken down when I found that the remote party couldn’t hear my voice. First I thought that this cable internet provider is blocking RTP ports or something like that.

However a little investigation revealed the problem is with the internet bandwidth. When I ran a series of speed tests, I got shocking results. My downlink was fluctuating between 512 to 256 kbps while the uplink was just 20-30 kbps which makes VoIP impossible. Did I say impossible? Make it possible. After hunting for the best compression codec I found g729. It just requires 13kbps which was what I needed. The other codec required more than 60kbps which caused 70% packet loss for outbound VoIP traffic. I am posting testmyvoip.net results for you to have a better picture. Thanks for g729. It simply rules and thanks for FWD for supporting G729. Now I can make and receive SIP calls.

I have asked my service provider to solve the problem because less than 3KB upload speed doesn’t make sense. It is even less than 56kbps dialup which offers 33kbps upload. I have told my cable internet service provider  that the problem is either because they have purchased Aysmetric bandwidth or they have purchased uplink and downlink bandwidth separately. Lastly, bandwidth cap/rate limit on SQUID could be the reason. Whatever the case be, I am a subscriber paying for the service and I want the problem fixed . Sorry if it sounds harsh.

Bye Bye City Cables

Finally I have switched to a new desi cable internet service. At least it stays connected and in the morning I get around 50-60kB download speed. Comapred to City Cable it surely is not good enough. I could get around 300-500kB in the morning but at rush hour it was around 20kB and sometimes as slow as dialup.

Yet this problem wasn’t the reason behind switching my Cable Service Provider. Since Last month City Cable is having this weird problem of Ping Replies breaking down from Server which was 172.16.0.1. They were running ISA server and even after one month they couldn’t resolve the issue.

Another problem which City Cable has is Port Blocking. I just hate Port Blocking. City Cable blocked many ports including BitTorrent ports from 3PM till 9AM.  Dancom Pakistan was providing them the Internet Bandwidth.

During the last days they even brought down their Movies Server (entertainment2 and entertainment3) but even then they couldn’t resolve the PING problem. This shows how inexperienced ICT staff they got.

I have even heard from a few sources that the people sitting on their servers are basically linemen.  Continual Disconnections became a norm and slowly they are losing their Subscribers. I have seen this here in Pakistan that instead of paying well and hiring good staff, the company owners do the opposite which eventually leads them to disaster.

Troubleshooting is a secondary thing. They couldn’t even pin down the problem in more than 1.5 months. Here, it is all because of the greed which company owners have to make all the money themselves.