Performance

Click on any of the following questions to jump to the answer:

1. What Internet speed do I need for turboDial?
   
2. How can I tell if the capabilities of my LAN, Router, PC and Browser will support turboDial?
3. My calls are getting dropped in the middle of a conversation. How can I prevent that?

Questions & Answers

What Internet speed do I need for turboDial?

Short answer: Less than you might think. But to be safe, try to have 1Mbps download and 512Kbps upload speed and don’t allow any other activities to compete with your use of the connection while you are on a call – no file downloads, no video streaming, no intensive web browsing by co-workers or family members. The more of these competing activities you have the higher download & upload speeds you will need.

You can test your Internet Bandwidth using this test provided by Twilio.

The speed and quality of your Internet connection is less critical if you make your calls from using a phone as your Calling Device rather than “This PC”.

Long answer: When you make calls using “This PC” you’re sending and receiving Voice-over-IP, VoIP,  through your Internet connection. An Internet connection is characterized by 4 factors:

• Bandwidth – you usually think of this as your download and upload speeds
• Latency – the time it takes for a packet to travel between your computer and the destination
• Jitter – the variation in packet travel times
• Packet loss

VoIP is not a bandwidth-intensive activity and requires only about 48Kbps. An Internet connection that provides 512Kb upload and download should be more than adequate for VoIP. More is always better, especially when there are multiple users or applications competing for the bandwidth.

Latency is very important. If your packets take a long time to reach the destination then you have a voice delay problem that makes conversations difficult. A latency of 20 ms is great, and 150 ms is bad.

Jitter is not usually a problem for voice. If it becomes large then it looks like long latency and packet loss, and you’ll get voice garbling.

Packet loss happens for many different reasons, and typically due to poor physical connections or PC computing problems. Packet loss will also cause voice garbling.

You can get a good measure of Bandwidth and Latency here: http://www.speedtest.net/

How can I tell if the capabilities of my LAN, Router, PC and Browser will support turboDial?

Twilio provides a test tool here.

My calls are getting dropped in the middle of a conversation. How can I prevent that?

This occurs when users encounter the “Twilio Error 31000 : Cll is no longer valid Please restore internet connection.”

What we recommend is to make sure your laptop is configured to never go to sleep. If the laptop sleeps/suspends then the Twilio connection will drop and could cause that error.