[App_rpt-users] temporarily disable echolink

[Brett Friermood]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 12:56 PM, Buddy Brannan <buddy at brannan.name> wrote:
>...
> BTW, Echolink stations have told me that my node isn’t the only one that
> does the following thing, so I wonder if anyone knows why, or even better,
> knows how to fix it. If I have more than, say, 2 or 3 Echolink stations
> connected, Echolink starts sounding “watery”, or has audio dropouts, or
> anyway, outgoing audio suffers quite a lot. All downstream audio, that is to
> say, audio coming into the node and being transmitted out the All Star
> radio, always sounds fantastic. Asterisk connections sound great both ways.
> Echolink, however, starts sounding awful for anything coming out of, though
> not going into, the All Star/Echolink connection. So if you’re listening to
> my node on Echolink, you’ll hear pretty rotten upstream audio. If you listen
> locally to all other stations, everything sounds beautiful. My suspicion is
> some transcoding issue, but I wonder if anyone else has a clue about this?
> Or am I even explaining it in a way that makes sense?

Sounds like a bandwidth issue to me. Unless you're on a symmetric
connection, most consumer connections are asymmetric with a much
slower upload speed than download.

If I'm not mistaken all VOIP connections are UDP so any packet
collisions cause those packets to never arrive at the destination.
This would explain why the inbound Echolink connections sound fine to
you, even when there are many, but the outbound connections don't. Too
much data trying to use the limited bandwidth causing dropped packets
and missing audio.

I'm not intimately familiar with the inner workings of AllStar, but I
believe the fact that AllStar functions well along side the flakey
Echolink connections stems from using IAX for the inter-Asterisk
connections.

I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm too far off.

Brett KQ9N