Voice chat breakup

[pergolesi]

My friend & I have the same USB headset, mine seems to work great, her voice is breaking up when we're chatting in the game and is illegible. She can hear me okay but I can't hear her except broken up. She has played with the settings, volume, voice activation level etc, but doesn't seem to work. However her micraphone test is okay.

How do we go about diagnosing this problem? I would suspect her internet connection, which is a satelite system, tho everything else works okay in the game. Is there anything we should try? Is there a site where I can learn more about tracking down the problem?

Thanx...:cool:

[Kalos]

It's probably her connection. You need very low ping rates for accurate voice communication, yet going via Satillite gives you a higher (slower data travel time) ping rate than dialup. Satillite is absolutely unsuitable, can't think of a worse pairing for VOIP data. ISDN, ADSL, 56K, they're all better in terms of ping, and that's what this technology relies upon.

[pergolesi]

Thanx. I'm surprised to hear that satillite might have a lower ping rate than dialup, but I assume that dialup would be totally unsuitable for WoW. Could you give a brief tip on how she can get a ping benchmark? She's a PC user...(I have a Mac and my cable internet is great.)

[Kalos]

http://www.speedtest.net/ Gives an accurate readout of bandwidth on the upload and download, as well as a ping readout from various locations.

Dial up is faster because the Satillite method has to go straight up into orbit and back down again, not once but twice, once to send the request for data, the second up-and-down for the delivery. Even at the speed of light, that kind of distance isn't instantly bridged, takes about 1-2 seconds. While dialup just pushes down the telephone line. Just because it has low bandwidth for holding data upon it doesn't mean what little data it holds will travel back and forth slowly. It holds next to nothing, but can easily move to and fro, easier and quicker than the satillite in orbit method.

Remember, the higher the ping, the more time it takes. A low ping is a good thing, it means the travel times are low.

While dialup is slower for most things due to it's pathetic bandwidth, WoW uses next to no bandwidth, apart from patches. Dialup would physically crank out better performance that satillite, for regular WoW playing. Patching would be a different story, but on ping alone, the satillite is an inferior system.

[Tunga]

Dial up is faster because the Satillite method has to go straight up into orbit and back down again, not once but twice, once to send the request for data, the second up-and-down for the deliveryThis assumes she has a very expensive two-way satelite system (i.e. a huge transmitter on her roof or somewhere). Since people generally don't have these most satelite internet relies on a dial-up connection for upload and uses the satelite connection only for download. This results in bad pings on most things and anything that needs a lot of upload (e.g. voice chat) suffers from the lack of bandwidth of the dial-up connection.

This makes sense in this case because she can hear you fine (high bandwidth on the satelite download part) but her voice breaks up a lot (low bandwidth on the dial-up upload part).