Vonage for Business Trunks ... How to set QoS

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Jul 28, 2005 Posts: 3

We're using a vonage box to provide two trunks lines that are connected to our PBX (Shoretel).

Our LD costs for the business literally averaged about from $1k to $1600/month. We were able to program a separate trunk group that used the two vonage lines and one other "all you can eat" LD line from our telco provider. The PBX is smart enough to grab a line on this trunk group if the call is long distance (otherwise it grabs a channel on our PRI where the LD rates are much higher).

Our LD bill is literally droped almost an order of magnitude. Only a handful of LD calls grab the PRI, and the only other contributing factor to our LD bill are our international calls (which are significant, but much cheaper on Vonage than through Qwest).

Can't say enough about the cost savings, and after we properly programed our router and PBX switch we've had no problems ... yet.

My concern is that eventually we'll have bandwidth issues, and I want to program our router/firewall to give vonage priority. It has a pretty reasoble QoS settings.

Question ... does Vonage send out packets with DSCP values in the packet header that my router can prioritize, or does it rely on specific ports that I can prioritize? I've been searching but haven't found any answers to this.

Would appreciate any info on this, and will gladly share other info about our experience with this setup (that I can't say enough good things about).

Posts: 2257 · Posted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 9:44 am Post subject:

I expect your firewall is more sophisticated than anything I've used, but there are several ways you can do this easily.

The first and simplest is prioritizing by the MAC address of your Vonage devices. Other than calls, you will see the occasional (infrequent) firmware update and some intermittent (once every minute or so) "chatter" as the Vonage device maintains the SIP connection, but that won't amount to much, so anything coming from a Vonage device can be prioritized without too much trouble.

The actual telephone calls happen on a random port between 10,000 and 20,000, so you probably don't want to prioritize that entire range.

There are probably things you can do with more sophisticated filters, etc, but I don't know what the criteria would be.

Posts: 56 · Full Forum Member Joined: Mar 15, 2006 Posts: 56

sorry- but could u tell me what a "trunk line" is?

Posts: 6 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 08, 2005 Posts: 6

vonage-forum.com/ftopic10794.html" target="_blank">http://www.vonage-forum.com/ftopic10794.html

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Jul 28, 2005 Posts: 3

abela2006 ...

A trunk line simply a phone line available to connect to the outside world from an phone system. A typical office has a ratio of about 1 trunk per 3 users, so an office of 60 people would have 20 inbound/outbound lines available to use for the 60 staff.

A typical business T1/PRI (i.e. digital) has 24 channels, 23 of which carry voice and the 24th carries data (caller ID etc.), so if you've got T1 for voice you've effectively got 23 lines available for outbound/inbound calls.

We've got a T1, but our LD rates are relatively high ($0.068 interstate) compared to Vonage. Started experimenting with Vonage using a separate trunk 'group' (3 lines with "all you can eat" domestic LD) on our phone switch. Once we got it programmed correctly, it automatically grabs one of these 3 lines for LD calls. If all 3 are being used, it grabs a channel on the T1/PRI.

On top of all this we're running site to site VoIP with our phone switch. I'm currently on a military base on the other side of the world but I'm able to make phone calls to the U.S. by connecting directly to our phone switch in the U.S. via VoIP, which then places outbound calls on either the LD trunk, or the PRI.

Not the most elegent solution, but so far it's worked great and this will literally save us +$1k/month.

That said, I'm wondering if/when some of these larger PBX providers (Cisco, Nortel, ShoreTel, Avaya, etc.) are going to start forming partnerships with VoIP providers so this is built into their systems. I see that Linksys already has a SoHO system that does this (though it doesn't connect to vonage).

Given that Linksys is owned by Cisco, and Linksys provides the hardware for vonage, it would seem that there might be an interesting marriage there. Gotta wonder if some exec at Cisco isn't looking at acquiring Vonage (for the connection to the CLECs, etc.) and begin building this into the routers/phone systems they already sell.

With Cisco powering a large % of the internet, seems they could immediately become a major competing force not only with the Baby Bells in the U.S., but with telco providers all over the world.

Posts: 2135 · Posted: Thu Apr 27, 2006 12:10 am Post subject:

uccprince: Very insightful. Thank you.

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Jul 28, 2005 Posts: 3

dgtrask

Thanks for the link to the other thread. I hadn't seen that one. Unfortunately I'm not using Cisco routers, and the thought of prioritizing 5k-10k ports doesn't seem like the most elegent solution.

Ideally, I was hoping that Vonage included 802.1p or DSCP values in the packet headers that my router would prioritize. That would be the cleanest approach.

NateHoy ... the MAC address options seems like a pretty simple solution and I think my router will support it (I think I've configured it correctly). Just need to verify.

Can I use a packet sniffer or something to determine if this is really working? How does one confirm the QoS settings are actually working?

Posts: 2257 · Posted: Thu Apr 27, 2006 7:06 am Post subject:

>>>Can I use a packet sniffer or something to determine if this is really working? How does one confirm the QoS settings are actually working?

Well, the easiest way is to start some really huge upload and make a few Vonage calls, at least that's what I recommend for consumers like me on our pathetic little Internet connections. Wink

Seriously, depends on your router. If you have SNMP, you should be able to extract the calculated priority of each packet. My router (a WRT54GL with aftermarket Linux firmware) is capable of giving me a lot, but does not provide the packet priority in the log data to WallWatcher, unfortunately.