Call dropping can be caused by poor internet connection quality, bad codecs or a faulty device.
VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) itself is a digital service, it should not drop or break-up calls or suffer from any added noise/echo problems.
However as the service is supplied over the internet, it is dependent on a stable connection with quality bandwidth.
The device you use with your VoIP service may also determine the quality of the voice audio.
Internet connection
If your internet connection drops (even for a second) it can drop a call that is ongoing at the time.
If your ISP is having issues with their network at the time or you are being shaped, this too may affect the quality of the voice audio being sent/received during a call.
If your internet connection is too slow you will experience break-ups in the audio or a delay in the sending and receiving of audio (latency).
It is for this reason that we recommend a minimum of 4Mbps Fibre internet speeds on unshaped data.
Router settings
It is also a good idea to check if your router supports QoS (Quality of Service), which is a feature you can enable to ensure that your router will always give first priority on your network to VoIP traffic over any other usage.
Device
If you are certain that your internet connection is of sufficient speed and quality and you still experience a break-up or poor quality audio, you may want to check which codecs are enabled on your device.
A codec, which stands for coder-decoder, converts an audio signal (your voice) into compressed digital form for transmission (over VoIP) and then back into an uncompressed audio signal for replay.
Sometimes using a different codec can improve voice quality as different devices work better using different codecs.
We recommend having a.Law, u.Law and GSM enabled as standard.
You may also look at purchasing a license for the G.729 codec which offers the best compression vs performance for most devices.
If after trying different codecs there is still no improvement, the problem might be with the device itself, try another device to test.
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