Technical environment and preparation

tiggadesk requirements

In order to make the best use of the tiggadesk portal, it’s good to find out how your network or internet connection perform. Modern broadband internet connections are most of the time more than sufficient. If you can run programs like Skype, teams, zoom or whatsapp over your network, you should be just fine.

High latency, slow internet speeds or loss of packets contribute to a potential bad VoIP experience, or the portal responding to slow to enjoy the overall experience.

The experience you’ll have, is determined by your part of the network, such as your router or modem, the number of users sharing your network, the applications they use or even the software they are running, combined with the quality of the internet in general offered by your internet provider.

Performing some tests and having some awareness of the factors that influence the success of tiggadesk, will allow you to optimal prepare your network and team for the best experience and call quality using tiggadesk.

Overview

Make sure you have enough bandwidth – although tiggadesk can run on relatively low bandwidths consider how many people are going to use tiggadesk and their current usage
Latency, speed and packet loss – A good and free tool is www.speedtest.net, and there are multiple online tools to check packet loss. Values up to 1.5% loss are acceptable, from a steady 5% you will experience ‘drop outs (words missing whilst calling)’
Firewall settings – Make sure your firewall and/or managed switch allows TCP/UDP in/out traffic on ports 5060 and 5061
If needed, set priorities – Most routers, smart switches or firewalls allow you to prioritise traffic: instead of all traffic distributed equally (round Robin) you can decide to give call traffic a higher priority. Your IT (network) supplier can help you out sorting these matters
If needed, implement a policy – If issues are caused by too many devices sharing your internet connection, you can also opt for introducing an internet usage policy on the workfloor instead of upgrading your connection. In this policy you can set out the office rules with regards to how your team uses the internet. For instance limit music or video streaming, no private up- or downloads, social media usage etcetera.

Network speed or bandwidth

It’s important to make sure that your internet connection has enough ‘bandwidth’ (the upload and download speed) to do VoIP calling. To slow either way, or both, means that there will be network congestion, which means deteriorated quality of our service.

The more tiggadesk workstations you plan, the more bandwidth you need: often this comes on top of your normal existing internet traffic, so it’s important to determine the ‘headroom’ you have.

If your network’s download speed is for instance 50Mbps, but your Upload speed is limited to 10Mbps, your network and by extension VoIP service can only receive 10 megabits of data per second, even though 50 Mbits come in every second.

The result could be a bad call quality and therefor it is important to look for the lowest value, which is mostly your upload capacity. Each concurrent call roughly needs to have 80 kbit/s of bandwidth available (in both ways), so in this case you’d be able to theoretically 10000/80 kbit/s =125 concurrent calls. As a rule of thumb that concurrent amount of calls would normally be enough to service an office of about 800-1000 employees.

Low network speed?

Make sure that you remove unnecessary network users that run in the background such as team members running video streaming services, listening to music or security cams continuously running. If you can’t remove anything, check with your Internet Provider how you can upgrade your existing connection; or consider having an additional internet connection specifically to use for your VoIP applications.

Latency

Another important factor in receiving the best call quality is to check the latency of your network / internet connection. Latency is easy to understand: imagine you play an online car driving game, and every time you turn the steering wheel it takes a bit of time for the game car to respond and you keep crashing. It’s also often called a lag or lagging. For gaming latency is super important, for tiggadesk and calling it is a bit less critical.

In order to determine how responsive the network and connection is, a latency test will determine how long it will take for the system to establish a connection. This is called a ping-test and is expressed in milliseconds (ms). High latency and packet loss go often hand in hand.

The lower the ping value, the better it is. A rule of thumb: any value under 100 ms is acceptable, and if you have measured lower then 65 ms you have found excellent values.

High latency?

Check how your pc is connected. In general wired connections have lower latency than wireless connections. More likely is that there is a lack of bandwidth on your network, caused by too many users or devices sharing the connection and therefor all this traffic creates traffic jams (congestion). Another factor can be simply the distance the data has to travel – the shorter, the faster.

Your firewall, router or network switch settings can also influence the speed of connecting. But also simple things as renewing your old network cables for the latest cat 6 ones, can make significant improvements.

Packet loss

If part of the data that you send doesn’t reach the recipient, we talk about packet loss. If you make a call, it means that some words or sound go lost on the way, resulting in you missing words and you experience this as ‘drop outs’.

Again, the most common reason for packet loss is congestion and/or lack of bandwidth. But the reason behind this congestion can be different for every scenario.

Perhaps you have too many users at once, too old hardware, unsuitable hardware (e.g. trying to run a 20 person office 24/7 over a cheap home router) or a badly configured or badly managed local network. As with latency, wired connections are often better than wireless ones.

A small drop in packets is not a big issue to still have an acceptable VoIP quality. However, if your packet loss is over 5%, you’ll definitely start missing words during your call.

High packet loss?

To make sure you get the best out of tiggadesk, limiting packet loss is one of the best ways to improve the quality of your VoIP experience. One of the tricks is to make sure that a router or network switch prioritise traffic that is identified as VoIP – and doesn’t queue it. This means that even when that colleague starts downloading that big file, the data packets for your call have the priority over the download of the file.

Your internet provider can often assist you in determining where you can improve performance; if you have a network installed that uses managed switches, talk to your IT provider to see where you can optimise your experience and how to prioritise traffic.

Firewalls

Firewalls can be software, dedicated hardware or built-in in hardware such as managed network switches. A firewall is designed to keep ‘unauthorised’ users or system out of your network. It’s like a border control. Based on its settings, the firewall will allow applications to have access to your office network and open ports. Any suspicious, blacklisted or not whitelisted traffic will be denied access by making sure that the port this application knocks on, stays closed.

But if not setup correctly, a firewall can also be a big party spoiler blocking programs or apps that should not be blocked. You can perform a firewall test to find out if certain ports that are needed are open so that tiggadesk can stream the call. See our requirements on whitelisted domains (URLS), ports and other requirements to make the best out of tiggadesk.

You can perform a firewall test to find out if certain ports that are needed are open so that tiggadesk can stream the call. See our requirements on whitelisted domains (URLS), ports and other requirements to make the best out of tiggadesk.

Make sure that you have a public IP, and that on your firewall the ports 5060 and 5061 are open. Configured these ports to allow TCP/UDP traffic going ‘in’ and ‘out’.