Router = Dropped packets?

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 30, 2004 Posts: 7

I have been having a terrible experience with Vonage, and I am at my wit's end. I have a DI 624 Extreme G wireless router with a Motorola box behind it, and I have been experiencing horrible service. About 50% of my calls drop or fade in and out to the point where it is impossible to hear. I have been working with tech support and they ran a packet loss/ latency test on the line and found that there was a fairly sharp packet loss right at the first hop. Of course, they blamed my ISP (Time Warner/ Road Runner) and the cable modem. I then ran a test with Time Warner directly plugging the cable modem into my desktop. No packet loss at all. This leads me to believe that the router is the cause of my problems.

I then got a version of PingPlotter and tried it without the router, and had less than 1% packet loss over a 12 hour period while both on and off the phone. When I put the router back in, I had the same pattern except when a call came in, and I had 90-100% packet loss, as the call went in and out.

So, my guess here is that it is the router causing the problem. Do other people have this problem? Could the router be defective? Could it be the firewall properties of the router? Is it possible that some kind of interference with the wireless aspect of the router is causing it flake out? Does anyone have a suggestion as to a better router? I need one because I use VPN, and without the router, the MTA box screws it up.

Additionally, even without the router, I've been having some poor quality calls (tinny and echoing). Any ideas here?

Thanks for the help...

Posts: 183 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: May 05, 2004 Posts: 183

Routers can most definitely be flaky, and yours sounds bad. A good router will have zero packet loss and give a 0 ms ping every time.

A lot of people have had good luck with Linksys routers, often on sale at Best Buy. I personally use an older PC running Smoothwall routing software, but that's not typical.

Posts: 183 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: May 05, 2004 Posts: 183

One other thing, did you try port forwarding? That might help. As for the tinny sound, check which voice quality setting you're on from the Vonage login.

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 30, 2004 Posts: 7

Gary,

Thanks for the reply...

I did try port forwarding, both based on some of the comments in this forum and using Vonage's own recommendations. No change.

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: May 14, 2004 Posts: 1

A router does block certain ports by default, hence the reason for opening certain ports when using the Vonage service. I would suggest placing the Motorola device immediately after your modem then connecting the router to the Motorola. This will take the router out of the loop. Another advantage to doing it this way is that the motorola device assigns itself 90k (or what ever you set your bandwidth saver) of bandwidth for calls. Whatever is left will then go to the router. If you connect the Motorola behind the router then is shares bandwidth equally with all your computers. As for audio quality, Vonage uses three different compression formats for the audio. You can ask tech support to switch you to a different format and see how it sounds.

Posts: 183 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: May 05, 2004 Posts: 183

Many users have reported problems using VPN, and even ATA stability issues, with the ATA in front of the router. Mine sits happily behind it.