Odd Signal problem

[Piet]

When having a voice/phone conversation via Signal, it often happens that
the conversation suddenly stops for a while or the connection is dropped.
The intervals at which the breaks or disconnects happen varies. I've seen
frequent breaks in calls with friends in the country, breaks a quite regular
intervals of 3-4 mins in calls with friends in Sweden, and no breaks at all
in calls with friends in Spain. With my wife's phone it's exactly the same.
We both have Galaxy's with Android 7, just different models.
I suspected the local infrastructure (wifi ap, router, internet connection),
but that's unlikely because everything else works like a charm. Line speed
can't be the problem: it's 100/100 fiber.
I found that right after a break began shaking the phone would help and the
conversation continued. After a disconnect making a new call was the only
solution though.

Eventually I found that, when during a conversation I shook the phone, say,
every minute, no breaks or disconnects did occur. Beats me... Of course it's
a workaround, not a solution.

Does anyone have any idea how shaking the phone can have this effect
and what would be a way to really solve the problem? Also wondering if
anyone else here is experiencing this odd behaviour.

-p

[Arlen Holder]

In response to what Piet <www.godfatherof.nl/@opt-in.invalid> wrote :

> I found that right after a break began shaking the phone would help and the
> conversation continued. After a disconnect making a new call was the only
> solution though.

Hi Piet,

I'm not so sure about shaking, but I used to bang TVs in the 50's and 60's
and that worked just fine sometimes!

I don't use Signal, where I had to look it up to see if it handled just
SMS/MMS only (which I had tested years ago), or if also handled VOIP and
video calls

The Signal web site claims it does:
o <https://www.signal.org/>
"Make crystal-clear voice and video calls to people who live across town,
or across the ocean, with no long-distance charges."

So one question I'd love to ask you on behalf of myself & others is how
well does it work for you (other than those drops you speak of) for voice
and video calls?
"Share text, voice messages, photos, videos, GIFs and files for free.
Signal uses your phone's data connection so you can avoid SMS and MMS
fees."

If Signal works well, maybe it's time for me to revisit Signal as I looked
at it years ago only for SMS/MMS but where I found it kind of clunky at the
time (but that was years ago) on Android 4.4.

As for why VOIP would drop, Oooma (which is different than Signal, of
course), tells me my "jitter" is too high, although Facetime, Zoom, Google
Voice, Hangouts, Jitsi, Jami, Whatsapp, and a host of others work just fine
on the same signal.

If you want, you can test your jitter in lots of web sites & software,
but I usually use the Ooma jitter testing site:
o <https://oomaoffice.speedtestcustom.com/>

My jitter is between 10 and 15, which Ooma says is too high
(but, interestingly, the mentioned VOIP programs work fine).

What's your jitter?
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