Frustrated with Vonage + RoadRunner

Posts: 67 · Full Forum Member Joined: Mar 22, 2004 Posts: 67

Well, I took the plunge and now I may be regretting it. My connection is via RoadRunner (Houston) and is typically about 2500k down and 380k up. Plenty fast. The service works great unless there is any Internet activity. No matter how slight, it makes the audio choppy for as long as there is network activity. I stripped down to just cable modem, MTA, PC and this did not solve the problem. I've tried the MTA on both sides of the router with no real difference (I'd like to put the MTA behind the router since the MTA is not the best for port forwarding and has a small MTU).

I talked to Vonage tech support. They had me run ping plotter, but I'm not sure how to interpret the results. My average pings to most places is about 50 or 60mS. But the variation is quite high. Also, I have some lost packets, but all downstream of my hardware. My guess is RoadRunner isn't going to be very interested in packet loss in their routers.

I've tried various variation of putting the MTA in DMZ, port forwarding, setting the MTA to DMZ (this doesn't work, by the way -- the MTA forwards ICMP packets, but apparently not UDP or TCP packets). I've tried using bandwidth saver to go to the 30k codec. This does seem to help, but not to any great extent.

The only thing I can think to try is see if Time Warner will swap me for a newer cable modem, although I don't see tremendous packet loss.

So the question is what else can you do? When the LAN is operating, it isn't possible to just say, "Oh, I'm on the phone -- everyone stop using the Internet!" On the other hand, I feel like the problem is related to the path, which I feel certain is not going to be something that can be resolved.

I find myself wishing I had not sent in the LOA so quickly -- should have waited to see that things would work well. I don't want to revert back to Verizon (ugh) but I may have to if I can't get better results. I understand that if the LAN is saturating the pipe, but this is nothing -- just loading the CNN home page chops my audio! Virtually anyting you do has a big impact on the audio.

Anyone else using RoadRunner? Any advice? This is a business account. I had been lobbying my wife to switch for home, but the experience so far has permanently turned her off (she is not enthusiastic about technology anyway, so even the smallest problem is all the excuse she needs).

Pretty much at my wits end. Any help out there? Thanks in advance!

Al W.

Posts: 89 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Feb 04, 2004 Posts: 89

Are you running Kazza, BitTorrent or any other P2P application? If so, stop them and try Vonage again. You can also try using the ATA in pass through mode in front of your router.

Posts: 67 · Full Forum Member Joined: Mar 22, 2004 Posts: 67

No P2P. In fact, when testing, I had nothing running except a Web browser.

As for pass through mode, I don't think that's an option in my case. RoadRunner will only assign one IP address per cable modem mac. So if the MTA gets an IP, the router doesn't and vice versa. I had actually tried half heartedly to get the MTA to work with no NAT, but no luck. I even tried having it spoof the router's address thinking perhaps they would both latch on to the same DHCP assignment (wishful thinking).

So unless there is some trick I don't know about to get the thing to work without NAT, this isn't an option. By the way, I realize that it might work OK like that if you were hooked to a network where both devices could DHCP a separate IP address, but that isn't the setup I have with Road Runner.

Thanks just the same.

Posts: 12 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Mar 18, 2004 Posts: 12

I have Road Runner in North East Ohio, well actually Earthlink provided thru RR and it works fine for me. I have not had to reboot it or anything. Granted im only on my third day and dont really websurf while Im on the phone. I have the toshiba modem to my Linksys 54G Router then to my MTA. I see how it would be frustrating for a business. I wish you good luck!

Posts: 10 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jan 26, 2004 Posts: 10

my friend had the same problem, he checked his data cables and had a bad connection. after replacing, his problem was solved

Posts: 67 · Full Forum Member Joined: Mar 22, 2004 Posts: 67

Well, using ping plotter and tracert, I don't see any problems close to me, so I doubt it is an issue with my network cabling. The cable TV cable -- well, that may be different, but even then I see good speeds and moderately low pings on the network most of the time. It is just that randomly the pings will be wildly higher. For example, right now I have a ping to one of the road runner routers that is an average of 20mS but the maximum is 299ms! This router is 4 hops away from my cable modem and the router before it pings from 9 to 45mS, I think a cable problem would show up before there.

Oddly enough, it seems to actually work better on the far side of the router, although it isn't much different either way.

Posts: 67 · Full Forum Member Joined: Mar 22, 2004 Posts: 67

Woo hoo! I just went and replaced my old Toshiba with an AMBIT modem (never heard of them). This seems to have fixed it! Ping plotter shows much more stable pings (at least with a short data set) and I had to really strain my connection to get any noticable voice degradation. Normal surfing, e-mail, etc. seems to be OK now.

I have the router in front since I would like to be able to have better control of open ports.

So if all else fails, see if the cable company will give you a newer modem!