Support Center / Troubleshooting
Choppy, Robotic, or Echoing VoIP Calls — Call Quality Fixes
Bad VoIP call quality has a small vocabulary: choppy or robotic audio is packet loss and jitter, delay-then-talk-over is latency, and echo is almost always an analog artifact at one end. Each symptom maps to a different fix, so name the symptom precisely before changing anything.
Symptom → cause → fix
Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
Choppy, words dropping | Packet loss | Find congestion or a failing link; QoS voice priority |
Robotic/underwater | Jitter (variable delay) | QoS; move phones off congested Wi-Fi/VPN paths |
Long delay, cross-talk | Latency >150 ms one-way | Check routing path, satellite/LTE backhaul |
Echo of your own voice | Far-end speakerphone or analog interface | Lower far-end speaker volume; handset test |
Degrades at busy hours | Bandwidth contention | QoS + cap bulk traffic (backups, video) |
The three questions that localize it
- One phone, one site, or everywhere? One phone: cabling/port. One site: that site's network or ISP. All sites: report it with call examples — the platform side can trace the media path.
- Both directions or one? You sound fine but they're choppy = your upload path is congested (typical on asymmetric broadband).
- Constant or time-of-day? Time-correlated degradation is congestion — the fix is QoS, not more bandwidth alone.
Echo specifically
Echo you hear is generated at the far end — their speakerphone level, headset leakage, or an analog gateway. Ask them to switch to the handset; if the echo disappears, it was their acoustic path. Persistent echo on calls to ordinary landlines merits a support case with call examples.
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Last reviewed August 6, 2026. Still stuck? Contact Signal Support from your portal — include what you expected, what happened instead, and one example phone number or extension.