Seriously struggling with zoom phones

[rfein]

We are a company of 25 staff, many of whom work with clients and need their phones on the go. We switched to zoom phones about 6 months ago and have been struggling intensely. Calls get dropped, missed, audio is inconsistent, voicemail notifications with a major delay until they actually appear... We've dug deep into the settings and a few things have helped, but nothing has solved the issue. The only thing that seems to potentially explain it is that we need very strong Internet connection to use the phones, it can't rely on phone data. We aren't receiving error messages, just extremely poor performance. I'm wondering if zoom phones are good for people who are primarily desk bound? Customer support comes back with the same auto responses with every ticket: send a screenshot. The issue that we can't screenshot what's not happening or capture the poor performance. Are others having these issues? Thank you.

[Eliot]

hi rfein,

sorry for your struggle with zoom phone.

have you had an opportunity to look at Viewing the Zoom Phone quality of service dashboard?  this may help pin point the cause of your issues.

https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_article=KB0070057

zoom phone uses the opus codec which is the same codec used by many of the cell phone companies.  it can work under less than perfect network conditions.

a few ideas.

1.  do you use any desk phones using a wired connection to your local area network?  if so, do you experience any zoom phone issues?  if you experience any issues with these desk phones, i suggest running zoom network connectivity tool to see is happening on your network.

https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_article=KB0058114

2.  i am not a good example of using poor cell data.  i use tmobile for my cell.  at least in las vegas, we get more than 100 mbps down and 10 mbps up.  in my house, i get 435 mbps down and 13 mbps up with 12 ms jitter and no packet loss.  here is a screen shot from my iphone 14 promax of spedtest detailed results.

however, when my wife visited new york city, the only way i could reach her in her hotel room was to call the hotel front desk. 

my suggestion is to install speedtest by ookla on your cell phones and run speedtest at the time these cell phones are experiencing issues. 

in the past, i was having trouble when trying to use cell data near my house and i called tmobile.  tmobile told me that one of their 5g cell towers was down and i was automatically connected to a 4g tower further away  from my house. 

another issue with cell data is that cell phone companies give priority to cell calls over cell data. 

my suggestion is to run a couple of speedtests and call your cell phone company with the results.  sometimes, the cell phone company has to reset your network connections on their side and will ask you to reset your cell phone.  on my iphone, i had to go to settings->transfer or reset iphone->reset->reset network settings.  unfortunately, this wipes out your wifi network settings and passwords but it fixed the problem that i was having.

3.  zoom phone has a option to switch a call to your phone carrier.  note that this option is charged per minute.

https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_article=KB0067457

Did my response answer your question? If so, please don't forget to mark the reply as an accepted solution.

thanks,  eliot