VOIP disconnecting all the time

Hardware Librem 5
1

Hi everyone.

BACKGROUND: I have been using my L5 as daily for a long time now. It is perfect, no issues with phone calls, text or really any other features of the phone.

I am now spending more time in my home office and I am looking to dump my data plan and move to a purely VOIP + wlan connection. What is truly amazing about the L5 is that Purism has built SO MUCH ui + related infrastructure that I am amazed to be using a vanilla linux distro on a mobile phone. In particular, I am amazed that there is a VOIP client built into the dialer app. I did a bit of searching in these forums and found the codecs that needed to be enabled with my voip provider and voila, the connection was seamless.

Currently, I am using one of my office lines hosted through my voip provider on my L5 and overall it is a pretty decent solution and I am pleasantly surprised how well it works on this line that has low volume call traffic.

However, I am running into a connectivity problems, both are probably related:

  1. The VOIP client keeps disconnecting. If I keep the voip client open on the VOIP ACCOUNTS interface, every 15 minutes or so it will disconnect and I have to manually reconnect it.

  2. VOIP calls will disconnect every 5 or 10 minutes directly during a call.

I need help with the following questions:

Q1) How stable are the latest updates? I have read over the last 3 months or some some issues around L5 having booting and call connection issues after some updates so I have been reticent to update my self. Anyone here daily their L5 and rely on call + sms working all the time that can confirm that the latest updates are okay? I really don’t want to go through a re-flashing procedure.

I am not that fare behind, I am on Byzantium, gnone 3.38.5.

Q2) Anyone else here use the VOIP client built into the dialer? What is your experience like? Do you use it purely over wlan, and if yes, how stable is the connection? Any disconnects when the phone is sitting vs disconnections when on a call? Trying to gather some data here to understand what is to be expected.

Q3) Does someone know if the VOIP client is a standalone binary that can be managed by systemd? At minimum I need something that will automatically initiate a re-connection on disconnection or simply do the dumb thing and reconnect every x minutes to resolve the client disconnection issue at minimum.

Q3) Does anyone know what log entries am I looking for with respect to the VOIP client? Does the client properly generate log entries so that I can start the troubleshooting process? Before I can open up a ticket with my provider I need to complete the due diligence on my end and resolve any issues here. As a side note, I have other lines here with the same VOIP provider using desktop Grandstream handsets and their clients have had no issue keeping a solid VOIP connection to the same provider over the last 10 years so the issue is definitely on the L5 side of things. I do suspect I will have to get their help to rack some of this down though.

I would love to hear from anyone using the L5 as a pure VOIP client, curious how that is working out for you guys.

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I use jmp.chat for getting texts and calls at home. I have it set up to take calls through a sip account. I can receive calls on gnome-calls and it works without a problem. I use it just over wifi.
As soon as I have wifi/data it connects automatically and doesn’t* disconnect unless I lose wifi/cell signal.
So I am not sure why yours does what it does. :man_shrugging:

* edited from does

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If you can get your service to turn off packet optimization, it may help.

In theory, packets are supposed to be reassembled back in the order they were sent. Optimization screws that up sometimes with voice and video. Sometimes they aren’t reassembled in time to be heard or seen properly, there may be packet loss, and disconnects and reconnects.

My old employer found that out with video conferences especially with China. (This was before Zoom.) Of course my employer, being a multi-billion dollar company, had clout with our provider and could demand it over leased lines.

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Aha. Interesting data point. Thank you.

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This is interesting as well, thanks Tracy.

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