Edit: Reader Christopher Woods notes in a comment that the following is also applicable to at least some models of Linksys phones, e.g. SPA942 and SPA962.

Do you use a Linksys or Sipura VoIP adapter? Do the people you are talking to ever complain about your voice breaking up, or missing or dropped syllables, or unexplained clicks or noise?

There is an obscure setting in Linksys/Sipura VoIP adapters that is usually set incorrectly for most applications, at least on a factory-fresh adapter. Go to the SIP tab and check the RTP Packet Size – for most users, it should be set to 0.020 rather than the factory preset of 0.030. If you are running a connection where latency is critical (say you have a cable or satellite box that requires a phone connection to “phone home”, or you are trying to use a FAX machine) then you may even wish to set this to 0.010, which further reduces latency, at the expense of using a bit more bandwidth. In any case, the default 0.030 is not the correct setting when using the most commonly-used codecs. For more discussion of this issue, see this thread at DSLreports.com, which discusses how the RTP Packet Size and Network Jitter Level settings can be tweaked to achieve lower latency, along with the tradeoffs.

Be aware that the RTP Packet Size setting is found under the SIP tab, and that setting is applied to all lines served through that adapter. However, the Network Jitter Level can be set individually for each line, under the Line tabs. One interesting comment in the above-mentioned thread is that if a provider forces you to use a low-bandwidth codec, decreasing the RTP Packet Size may increase the quality of your calls, but again at the expense of increasing bandwidth used.

Changing the RTP Packet Size on one VoIP adapter resolved a few strange issues with audio quality. In this case the adapter was being used to connect to an Asterisk box on the same local network, so bandwidth usage wasn’t an issue. We set the RTP Packet Size to 0.020 and the Network Jitter Level to low, and it made a noticeable difference in the reduction of strange noises and breakups heard by the party on the other end of the conversation. However, changing the Network Jitter Level isn’t as critical as changing the RTP Packet Size, and in fact, changing the Network Jitter Level may be entirely the wrong thing to do on certain types of connections (probably not a good idea if your adapter is connected through a Wireless ISP, for example).

I must thank Paul Timmins for being the first to point out that the Linksys PAP2 has a default packet size of 0.030, which is incompatible with the uLaw (G711u) codec (or at least in violation of the standard). With that lead, I then discovered other articles (including the discussion thread linked above) that said essentially the same thing. So check those adapter settings, folks!

(And by the way, this advice probably does apply to some other makes of VoIP adapters, and even some IP telephones, but since I don’t have any readily available to look at, I can’t say for sure. If you know of any others that need to have a similar setting tweaked, please feel free to add a comment to this post).