My trouble with phones, part 1

For some reaosn, at our house, the phone lines seem to be iffy. Of course, if we call a service person out to take a look but they cannot find a problem, then they'd say the problem is inside the house, so they would charge us for a service call and not have fixed anything.

So I need to have a quantifiable way of measuring the problem we are having with the phones.

Basically, the problem is that often on calls, I am told that they can hardly hear me. I've thought it could be our Siemens phone system, which may be contributing to the problem, but I've also been told that using a different phone. I have taken a phone outside to the junction box (whatever it is called) and I have seemed to have replicated the problem outside, too, which would indicate the problem is not from inside the house. However, I really need to have a quantifiable way of measuring the extent of the problem.

The problem is only outbound traffic, so I never have problems with hearing what other people are saying. The problem does not occur all the time. However, since I never hear my own voice on a call, I never know when there is the problem and how often it occurs. Whenever I call home, I never seem to have the problem hearing what Kyoko is saying.*

Anyway, since it is a problem for people not to hear me on calls, we did sign up for Lingo. However, there seemed to be extremely poor quality on calls to Japan, so we ended up dropping Lingo. My current alternate provider is Skype. Other people sometimes hear an echo with Skype. I've gone through the FAQs but there does not seem to be an easy answer with that either. Also, since I am not the one who hears the echo, I am not sure how often the problem is with the echo. I may have to try Vonage next...?

(* This has led me to wonder if the frequency of my voice is such that it is difficult to transmit over phone lines. There are insects which chirp at such a frequency that even though the human ears can hear the sound they make very clearly, someone on the other end of the phone would not hear them at all. Is the same true with my voice?)