Digital voice bandwidth?

[#1]

How will the digital voice switch work for those of us with very low bandwidth "broadband"?

My parents get 200-300Kbps upload speed (and lots of disconnections), will this be enough to maintain a landline service?

They're on Plusnet ADSL, I regularly check for other options - currently BT offer "Superfast Fibre Broadband" with speeds of "0-1Mbps"...

[#2]

@wellsyke 

It's enough to carry the voice OK, but it will not ride through disconnections. If they are serious have you raised a fault?

[#3]

Been playing with this recently, and can confirm that you really need around 500kb/s up to allow VOIP to work seamlessly.  My experiment has been to see if I can use a 4G gateway/router to provide enough bandwidth to allow VOIP to work. 

Initially I was using an outdoor omnidirectional MIMO antenna pair, located around 25ft above ground level.  That gave about 1 bar of signal at the gateway, and although VOIP connected it would breakup and produce a garbled sound, with gaps, so was not really usable.  I ran speed tests with that setup and the upload speed (which is what seems to be critical) varied a great deal, from around 300kb/s to maybe 600kb/s.  Very hard to get consistent results though.

Replacing the omnidirectional antennas with an outdoor, dual antenna, high gain directional  setup got the signal up to between 2 and 3 bars at the gateway and that gave a massive improvement in speed, up to around 3Mb/s to 4Mb/s (upload) at times.  VOIP phones work fine with this bandwidth, I cant tell any difference between that connection and our Plusnet FTTC connection, which is a fair bit faster.

[#4]

You actually only need around 100kb/s for a voip call. What is more important is low jitter i.e deviation in transmission times. The problem is that low speed lines are usually slow because they are error prone and thus subject to high jitter.

[#5]

Thanks, that sort of tallies with the high degree of variability I was seeing when trying to speed test the original connection.  It was all over the place, so my guess is that would have been an indicator of a fairly high error rate, perhaps.

[#6]

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@wellsyke wrote:

My parents get 200-300Kbps upload speed (and lots of disconnections)

I wonder whether it would be worth your while looking in to this -

          Ofcom : Your right to request a decent broadband service 

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[#7]

Been there, done that.  My experience was that Openreach used the very high cost of upgrading the infrastructure as a justifiable reason for doing nothing.  In our case the cost of the work by Openreach was in excess of £30k, so I would have needed to pay the lion's share of that cost.

In my case I got lucky, in that the MOD sold a derelict site for business use and in order to make the land saleable they footed the bill to get a fibre cabinet close to the location.  As it happened, once that was installed I was able to get an FTTC connection to that cabinet (although it's a fair way away, 1,489 metres wire length according to the checker.

[#8]

I got in touch with Ofcom a while ago, at the time one of the mobile networks claimed to cover the location so Ofcom said it was served with broadband and there was nothing else they could do.

I might have been able to get a signal from that network with an external mast, we certainly couldn't with a handset outside on the ground, nevermind inside.

I think coverage has improved since then so it's probably worth revisiting .

[#9]

You could check the mobile network coverage with this - Ofcom - mobile coverage checker 

and click through to "View map of available services"

then while viewing the map, ensure "Indoor" and "Data" or "5G Data" are selected

then toggle through each of the network providers (Vodafone, O2, EE, Three) and see which gives best coverage

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[#10]

Have you considered Fixed Wireless Access broadband ?

Try putting your parent's 'County' name into this list to filter Fixed Wireless Access providers in their area

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