Self Help Articles: Packet Loss and QoS

Posts: 4

Being a new subscriber to Vonage, I was about to give up after 3 days of frustration. My original setup was: PAP-2 phone box with a WRT54G v5 router. The voice was sounding so bad, chopping all the time like if there was no QoS set on the router.

So I decided to return the PAP-2 adapter and buy a WRT54GP2 (same router with buitin voice). Then the voice quality was perfect, but the call got dropped and Internet connection reset after a few minutes of talking.
Called tech. support at Vonage Canada, who asked me to disable every QoS parameters (even the upload parameters). He did "adjustments" on his side and the problem disappeared since. Can someone explained to me what happened? I suspect that new router to be as broken as the other one (WRT54G) was, with the QoS feature totally inefficient.

Thanks

Posts: 1123 · Vonage Forum **MVM** Joined: May 26, 2005 Posts: 1123

First of all, yep, someone can explain it for you. Secondly, start a new post and follow the rules in the post at the top of the forum so we may help you more efficiently.

BTW, the 54G v5 is not very Vonage friendly and indeed has some QOS issues. Version 4 works great with Vonage, and has LOTS of firmware available for whatever you need. I'd recommend that if you really like the 54G is to grab a Version 4 on Ebay or wherever you can. There are posts related to this, but darned if I can find em right now. Need coffee.

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: Jan 12, 2006 Posts: 7

I'm still struggling to fix my voice quality problems, and can comment from the perspective of someone running pingplotter and obsessing over discarded packets. The articles are really helpful in understanding what a dropped packet is, the difference between those and lost packets, why they may create problems, etc. One thing to discuss might be, when looking at a tracert or a pingplotter report, is what are the normal ranges that point to a problem? Examples might be 1. What if the local router and modem hops show timeouts or errors...is that normal to see or is it a problem? There is one post on the forum that talks about ignoring the first couple hops because sometimes you can't ping your own modem. 2. What is the threshold percentage on the pingplotter reports when dropped or lost packets becomes a problem? Should you always see 0 or 1, even hops away from home?
There is information out there describing the signal ranges that the modem should display. Information like that for tracert and plotter would be great in this article too. Thanks for working on it.

Now I am going to go open my own thread and ask these questions personally, so if anyone wants to jump in and answer them, I'd really appreciate it. My 20 year-old comp sci degree only goes so far, I guess!

Posts: 2257 · Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2006 6:38 pm Post subject:

In general, PingPlotter sends out a "yellow" signal when a single hop involves more than 200 ms delay.

In reality, it's hard to nail down an exact number, since it's also dependent on the number of hops between you and the remote, and it's also largely an exercise in frustration since it's quite possible that even your ISP cannot do anything about it.

I'll put some more notes about the cable modem data, and the pingplotter results, on the article and get the updates posted this evening. Thanks for the feedback.