Users complaining of poor call quality, but call quality dashboard looks good?

[Nicholas Semenkovich]

We're new to Skype for Business Online / Calling Plan, and our users are all complaining about poor quality calls. They say calls just sound "bad" and they frequently have to repeat themselves, or ask callers to repeat themselves.

I'm having a tough time debugging this:

• The Call Analytics Dashboard rates nearly all our calls as "Good" even when users complain about them.
• Some calls show "High level of echo remained after echo cancellation" in the Advanced tab of the dashboard, but even then, the overall call quality seems to be listed as "Good".
• We always pass the Skype Network Assessment Tool, and seem to have consistently low latency & jitter to the Skype Anycast IP.

One thing we thought was this might be codec related -- all our calls are from Polycom VVX 501s -- but they only seem to use G.711 as a codec (Skype for Business Online seems to reject calls negotiated with G.722, or any other codec.).

Does anyone have any debugging tips for call quality issues?

[#2]

How is the quality if you test with a call from a pc?

[#3]

Our users never call from PCs; I'll try to get them to make some test calls.

Digging more into the Call Analytics portal, the "Advanced > Debug" data includes some more information -- under many of our calls that are marked as "Good" -- but users say sound terrible -- there's an MOS Quality value "MediaLine[0].InboundStream.QualityEstimates.Audio.RecvListenMOS".

For these calls, our RecvListenMOS is always ~2.3 which is abysmal. Is anyone else seeing this?

[#4]

Hi Nicholas,

Are you still experiencing poor call quality? I know there have been issues with MS Phone System that affects PSTN calls only. We see calls are being reported as "Good" in the dashboard.

We are fining it difficult to get an answer from MS as to why this is happening....

[#5]

Scott,

Do you have any case open with Microsoft so i can take a look? In general the MS-RTCP metrics which are used to populate the dashboard with the information about the call. 

Are you seeing this in the analytics ddashboard? If so, you will see what the cause of the poor classification is. 

[#6]

Scott,

Do you have any case open with Microsoft so i can take a look? In general the MS-RTCP metrics which are used to populate the dashboard with the information about the call. 

Are you seeing this in the analytics dashboard? If so, you will see what the cause of the poor classification is. 

[#7]

@Scott Elliott and @ivanja:

Our users are still complaining of very poor quality for PSTN calls -- but the dashboard always says calls are "Good" (even though the Advanced > Debug info usually shows inbound call quality MOS around ~2).

We opened a case in the preview portal (#1244446) but heard nothing so far.

Our owner is quite upset, and we're now trying out other VoIP providers. We've tested three thus far (8x8, RingCentral, OnSIP), all of which sound perfect -- so pretty clearly a Skype for Business issue.

[#8]

Any other metrics which are out of threshold? I would start to capture a wireshark/netmon log and your UCCAPI logs to understand why this is occurring. 

how many users are affected?

[#9]

Effectively all users in our tenant are affected.

Here's a copy of all the Skype for Business Analytics portal logs of a call that a user said was very poor quality:

https://gist.github.com/semenko/6ce1c3f4c50c0928a55f53f40c8b9e5b

Not much stands out, other than the RecvListenMOS which is still abysmal. The inbound speech & noise levels are the same -- which seems very bad, but not sure how to fix that.

(Collecting some wireshark logs; our users only use Polycom handsets, so no Skype client logs.)

[#10]

Hi Ivan,

We have an open ticket with MS however they keep saying there is no update. This has been going on for over two weeks now and is really bad timing. Our customer ported all of there numbers over to MS Phone System only to find out they had bad call quality from day one. Not a good experience at all.

We can 100% confirm this is an issue with MS Phone System and not the customer network after testing a scheduled conference call where all users dial into the call via the PSTN. All users were using a landline dialling into a conference hosted in the cloud and all users experienced terrible call quality.

I even had an MS engineer call me regarding another case and his call quality was terrible. I asked if he was using MS Phone System and he said yes. This is affecting them too!

MS confirmed they have an issue however we have no idea when this will be fixed.

We have a case open with MS yes.

[#11]

That outbound speech level is indeed concerning. However, the inbound looks pretty solid. Other metrics look however, some deviation on the max RTT and Jitter. Was the call bad during the whole session?

[#12]

@Scott Elliott Did you get any resolution to this issue? Or do you happen to have an issue number we can share with our support folks?

The overall quality of this service has been abysmal; it's just not ready for prime time. We're now semi-urgently evaluating other VoIP carriers.

@ivanja The whole call was poor quality. :\

[#13]

@Nicholas Semenkovich

We have had response from MS that this has now been fixed. The customer has also not reported issues for the last few days too which is very positive.

Overall the service wasn't good and 3 weeks to fix the issue I feel is totally unacceptable. We are monitoring the situation over the next few days. Will report back if the poor call quality returns...

Thanks,

Scott