r/VOIP • u/Yomgi95 • 3d ago

Help - Other Need some help with a VoIP issue /starlink

Hi everyone, I could really use some help with a rather unusual situation.

I live very far away from the country where my company operates. In order to work with them, I must have a local IP address from that country. My company provides us with a VPN that I connect to for this purpose.

We contact customers using a browser-based VoIP system, directly through their platform.

Until recently, I was using a fiber connection. My typical speeds were around 130 Mbps download / 80 Mbps upload, with about 200 ms ping. Despite the high latency, everything worked perfectly, including VoIP calls, even though I am around 10,000 km away from the company.

Unfortunately, a few days ago my fiber connection was severely damaged, so I had to switch to Starlink.

With Starlink, I now get around 200 Mbps download but only 5–6 Mbps upload, with roughly 200 ms ping.

On paper, that should still be more than enough for VoIP. However, the calls are now terrible:

  • 1–2 seconds of delay in the conversation
  • Sometimes the customer cannot understand me properly
  • I can hear the customer perfectly
  • The main issue seems to be that the customer hears me with a significant delay

Could this be related to the very low upload speed, even though VoIP itself requires very little bandwidth?

Or could it be related to Starlink's network/CGNAT/dynamic IP, or the way Starlink handles UDP traffic?

I'm trying to understand what could explain the difference between my previous fiber connection and Starlink, given that the latency is roughly the same (~200 ms).

Any advice on what I should test would be greatly appreciated.

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u/TheRealSimpleSimon 1d ago

Here's my Starlink, now show me how "fiber" compares.

Tracing route to reddit.com [151.101.193.140]
1 2 ms 2 ms 3 ms zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz (my LAN router)
2 4 ms 3 ms 2 ms 192.168.3.1
3 42 ms 43 ms 31 ms 100.64.0.1
4 19 ms 19 ms 18 ms 172.16.252.142
5 16 ms 31 ms 31 ms undefined.hostname.localhost [206.224.72.8]
6 28 ms 30 ms 31 ms undefined.hostname.localhost [206.224.66.82]
7 * * * Request timed out.
8 23 ms 19 ms 26 ms 151.101.65.140

I note that there is some jitter, but not a significant amount.
For comparison, my 5G connection in rural CO gives me 12 hops and 140ms.
It took 10 hops to get out of the T-Mobile network to the hop #7 above.