I’d agree with you, except that it *only* happens with Echolink connections, and I have a pretty consistent 5mbps upstream speed. On Jun 23, 2014, at 9:27 PM, Brett Friermood <brett.friermood@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 12:56 PM, Buddy Brannan <buddy@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