Robert Terzi wrote:
The best tool I've found for monitoring connections, routes, congestion,
is called PingPlotter. http://pingplotter.com/ It's a shareware visual traceroute. It continually graphs the traceroute style
responses. There is a scrollable timeline to view how things change.
You can get raw data out of it as well. It records changes in routes.
Thanks for the excellent link. I've had Asterisk on a home network and Broadvoice for a couple weeks now. IAX2 calls between Firefly soft-phone on my desk and other soft phones directly on the net have worked fairly well, but reported voice quality when going out over broadvoice to the PSTN has really stunk, making it only marginally useful.
So I've downloaded this utility and am now tracing out sip.broadvoice.com, using UDP (as my ISP filters icmp.) Actually, the trace doesn't get past broadvoice's edge router, so I replaced the final IP address with that of the edge router itself so I could see the data instead of destination unreachable.
Anyway, with only 20 minutes I've data I'm seeing some rather disappointing results.
First off, I have Sprint Broadband Direct internet service, a fixed wireless setup with a 2-5 Mbps downlink and a terrible 128 kbps uplink. So I know I'm in for trouble anyway.
First hop off my home lan over the wireless starts at about 9% packet loss. Sucks but for normal TCP based stuff (email, web, ssh, etc.) life goes on but just a little slower.
The broadvoice edge router (63.251.209.126, their lax site) is another 11 hops away. One hop before that, the packet loss rate has gone up to 13%, so the Internet adds another 4% to my sucky ISP connection. Round trip time to this point is 200ms, so-so but livable.
Here's the kicker:
Reported packet loss from broadvoice, one additional hop, is a whopping 29%. So between the last "Internet" router (bbnet2.lax.pnap.net) and broadvoice's edge router, there is an additional 16% loss.
No wonder my outgoing voice to the PSTN is choppy, filled with several second gaps, and makes people laugh at me for spending $20 a month on VOIP. I admit I can help things a bit by getting an ADSL or SDSL link with a better provisioned uplink, but even if I had 0% loss to broadvoice, their own net connection seems seriously under-provisioned.
One thing might be affecting this and make these numbers suspect--broadvoice might have QoS on the edge router such that non-RTP packets get lower-class status, so my UDP pings are artificially dropped in favor of real RTP traffic (actually, I'd be doing this if I were them.) Anyone care to comment on how realistic a test this is?
I'll do these tests for a few hours and hit the different broadvoice proxy networks and see if there is a difference, and compare to loss rates for other sites over my ISP uplink.
Anyway, my Digium 11b card comes in tomorrow, so I'll be off to more fun setting up the IVR and voicemail, etc., for my home line off the PSTN...love this Asterisk thing.
-Johnathan _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
