Satellite VoIP

[satelliteguy]

I have Direcway satellite service and I am thinking of ordering Vonage or some other voip provider. Does anyone know if satellite & voip will work together - I guess more specifically, if Direcway and Vonage will work together?

Thanks in advance.

[David S.]

This seems to be a very popular subject right now. Currently the answer is not so much. I have talked to many folks who have Vonage and Direcway and have heard comments such as users can hear folks on the other end but can not talk back and horrible static. Other problems include calls dropping or not connecting at all. In a few instances, people have made calls normally through Vonage but this seems to be the exception.

I would advise you to steer away from Vonage for the time being if you are using Direcway. I know that both Direcway and Vonage are aware of the situation ? and speaking to a Direcway rep about the situation, he informed me that Direcway is working on their own VoIP solution that will be available by the fourth quarter.

There are a couple of theories floating out there as to why Vonage (and most VoIP providers) are not working well with Direcway. Some have claimed that Direcway worked fine with VoIP up to last summer and then Direcway made some sort of internal change and VoIP never worked after that point. Another common answer is the latency issue. Since signals are being sent up to a satellite then back down, there is a latency period of when the data is sent and received. According to this theory, Direcway?s latency is out of acceptable ranges for Vonage?s systems and is causing the problems of bad reception, no clear signal, and dropped calls. The final theory is that Direcway is not prioritizing the voice packets. Obviously when dealing with voice the packets must be put in a specific order or the voice signal would be scrambled. If Direcway is not giving priority to voice data packets then indeed you would experience many problems including static, loss of signal or not being able to make a call at all.

Fear not, I believe that VoIP over satellite will be up and running soon. VoIP is getting too popular for Direcway and Vonage to not deal with the situation. Personally I am waiting to see what Direcway offers in Q4.

Hope this helps.

[halite]

I have encountered that you can hear voices on the incoming end, but a person can hardly hear you when you are using the direcway and vonage systems together. Very frustrating when you are at a bush camp, and need to get news back to the office!!! On a positive note, the internet is great, even on wireless laptops!

Hope they figure the phone signal out soon... cause the big boss is about to replace the system because we are so fed up.

[satelliteguy]

Haha. Tell it like it is Halite! That seems to be the consensus from what I am hearing. BTW Thanks for the info David S. I agree Direcway / Hughesnet satellite internet has been great thus far! Sounds like they are getting things together for voip soon. Can't wait until it works good. Hopefully soon!

[Jing75]

I can tell you from first hand experience that Vonage and Hughesnet do not play well together. While on a call you can hear the other party perfectly fine, however on their end they claim that is like talking to someone underwater or inside a blender. Even adjusting the Vonage bandwidth settings apparently doesn't help much, I reduced the voice bandwidth to 30 kbps and it still is bad. I was told that after making that change the other party could at least hear about every 5th word clearly, so if you are good at talking in code and know that every 5th word gets heard then maybe you could hold a conversation that way. The limitation definitely has to do with the current upload capability of the satellite system, the 200 kbps isn't enough to carry the voice load at a sufficient speed. Also like the other guy was saying there is no priority to voice packets so it gets mixed up with any other transmission headed for the satellite. Data seems to retain its integrity fine, but the voice not so much. I am really looking forward to someone coming up with a solution to this problem, as I really do not want to have to get local service with the phone company (all Verizon employees should die). If I had the option of getting service from them and poking my eye out with a screw driver you would know me as blinky the one eyed man. We live in the 21st century why haven't we advanced our communications more by now????

[SkyLink]

I know that most VoIP services do not work well over direcway. However some do work. I'm a VoIP service provider, you can check out my website at www.SkyLinkTek.com under products go to Voip link. I only direct you here because my product works very well over Satellite, As a matter of fact this has been designed with Linksys for use over Satellite. This works great over my Satellite service and I'm going to be testing my product over direcway in the next week or so. I will let you know the results. Some other opions that seem to use a smaller amount of bandwidth and do work with satellit is flyphone and ??? hmmm sorry drawing a blank and the moment on the other provider. If you like any kind of quality I would not suggest using Vonage over a direcway, Packet 8 does not work at all over any satellite at this time. Thanks for listening.

SkyLink