January 18th, 2007
High-pitch-voice women and Vonage calls sometimes don't mix
No, I am not talking about discrimination in employment. I am talking about what happens from time to time when someone with a high-pitched voice- presumably a woman- uses Vonage's service.
First learned about it on Dan Connor's daily Vonage Forum Digest, which highlights interesting Vonage Forum threads each business day.
One of the threads he highlighted in Wednesday's Digest is named, My Callers Hear Buttons Being Pushed.
"When I'm talking with someone every now and then they complain of hearing buttons pushed on the phone when I'm not pushing anything," wrote Vonage Forum Member lisa3876. "Occasionally I can hear it too."My modem (as you'll see below) needs updating but I've used my Vonage service with other people's newer modems and still have the same problem," she explains. Then she includes her Vonage test statistics.
"Yeah, this has been discussed many, many times in the past," answered Member EZCo. "The tones you hear are called DTMF tones and can be triggered by higher frequency voices, such as a female voice."
"The root cause is that Vonage uses out-of-band signaling for DTMF tones," explained another Forum Member, this one by the name of DMS1. "This means that your phone adapter detects the dual tones associated with button presses and transmits them separately to the actual audio. The other end then reconstructs the tones.
"This is a very good practice with VOIP because DTMF tones can get messed up by the voice compression (if low or medium quality is selected) or by jitter in the IP transport," DMS1 points out. "Unfortunately, the tone detection can occasionally detect false tones occurring as a result of normal speech. This is particularly true with female voices.
"If you ask Vonage, they may be able to turn off OOB DTMF signaling on your adapter," DMS1 adds. "However, this may cause problems when you try entering information (account number) etc. using button presses."
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
