[lyndy]

We have a virtual office with employees scattered around New England, California, Colorado, and North Carolina; we recently purchased 16 SPA-841 phones. 2 have been returned for fairly obvious manufacturing defects (one had continuous BUZZ from speaker while powered on, other had erroneous results while pressing number buttons (pressing the number 5 would result in the number 1 in display)). Our service provider is VocalNet in New York. We have experienced on nearly every phone, but not simultaneously, problems with Echo, voice fading to barely audible, and calls that are dropped in mid sequence. I have udated firmware on all phones (reducing dropped calls), and have set the QoS (Quality of Service) to high for the phone, on those staff with routers which support QoS. All staff have DSL or Broadband connections with good ping times of <40ms. We have set the preferred Codec to G729a on all units.

My service provider has fielded most calls (though slowly) and keeps telling me that it must be quality of hardware or quality of the public internet. Are there other things I can test? Do the problems sound like hardware issues that could be resolved with better quality phones? Or could it be that the virtual PBX system hosted by VocalNet needs some tweaking? I just don't know which direction to point myself to resolve the issue....