Cisco Jabber audio quality

[Barbarella108]

I use Cisco Jabber (with Cisco Finesse with a company VPN connection in Windows11) to receive calls for my work.

When I launch a video from YouTube, the sound quality is perfect. When I activate Cisco Jabber, to access my phone service the sound quality suddenly becomes poor. This problem is present only if I use my Jabra Bluetooth headset. Not with a wired headset.

Is there a way to keep the good quality sound for my calls even when I use Cisco Jabber?

Thank you for your ideas.

[Jonathan Schulenberg]

Just to clarify: is the audio from the YouTube video (or another source) degrades when you launch Jabber; or, is it audio from a call on Jabber that is noticeably worse with a headset than the built-in laptop speakers?

If the former, this is expected but only when you are on a call. Bluetooth devices have to switch profiles from headset to handsfree for a call. The former supports higher bit rate (but not lossless) stereo audio but no microphone while the latter supports telephone-quality mono audio and a microphone.

If the latter, assuming you have RTCP enabled in CUCM for audio calls, what do the call statistics of Jabber show for the call? Are there drops or excessive jitter?

[Barbarella108]

The sound clip is playing in good quality in the background and right when I launch Cisco Jabber, the sound coming from the Youtube clip becomes of bad quality, (with the same volume as before)

[Barbarella108]

One question: where can I enable this or at all check if this setting is enabled pls: 'RTCP enabled in CUCM for audio calls'

[Jonathan Schulenberg]

Look in Jabber preferences to see if there is a Proximity option and toggle it off. I don’t have the app installed anymore to look myself. Proximity uses the microphone to listen for ultrasonic beacons from video endpoints for pairing and control. If there isn’t a user-visible option in the app, you can force it off as an admin using the EnableProximity parameter. Proximity is not supposed to use Bluetooth headsets for exactly this reason. If that fixed the issue and you’re pairing the headset directly to the laptop. (I.e. no USB dongle) you could probably open a TAC case to chase that as a defect so you don’t have to disable it forever.

I believe RTCP can be enabled under System > Enterprise Phone Configuration. I enable it on all of my deployments but it does add 5% to the media bandwidth. You would need to recalculate your QoS LLQ bandwidth allocation or CUCM Location bandwidth if you have Call Admission Control properly implemented.

[Barbarella108]

It works! Thanks a lot Jonathan!