RTP300 & Comcast

Posts: 170 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Dec 05, 2004 Posts: 170

Interesting. They seem to favor the Netgear RangeMax 240 Wireless Router in both categories. Anyone use this one yet? It seems to be a fairly decent product.

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Apr 24, 2006 Posts: 4

VonageTPA wrote:

If you're using the linux box as a firewall/router, put the RTP300 behind it -- the linux box will be a superior router, and the Vonage adapter shouldn't encounter any issues living behind it.

Yea, I've come to enjoy the fact that I can shut everything down except the modem and Vonage router and still maintain the phone line. However, everything is UPS'd, so I don't mind going back to living behind the Linux stockade. Good suggestion. I'll run like that for a while and monitor the stability.

Really, I just want a basic phone adapter. No doubt this router is consuming fairly substantial power. I don't need/want the routing or hub. Oh well...

Posts: 1715 · Posted: Fri Jun 23, 2006 12:27 am Post subject:

The little PAP2 isn't a bad adapter, especially for the size (the 120v/240v adapter isn't bad either.) It has a bit of background noise compared to my IP phones and it's not as quiet as my RTP300, but it's much quieter than any of the RT31P2 routers I've dealt with. I have a couple of PAP2-NAs, use them with Asterisk and a few other Voip providers. The noise issue is minor compared to how cheap these things are (~$30-40/port)

Posts: 170 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Dec 05, 2004 Posts: 170

I went ahead and bought the Netgear WPNT834. It's a bit overkill for what I'm doing (1 wired desktop, 1 wireless laptop, 1 RTP300), but I'm impressed with the router's capabilities. I just now hooked it up. There's no noticeable slowdown in speed as opposed to connecting directly to the cable modem, unlike when I used the RTP300 as a router, so that's a good sign! Also, the wireless works well, just as good as the wired. I get pretty good signal anywhere in my house without additional antennas or repeaters. So, let's hope Vonage works well with it. Only time will tell, though I did a test call to my cell phone and it worked fine.

Maaz

Posts: 170 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Dec 05, 2004 Posts: 170

I spoke too soon, the Netgear WPNT834 does have a problem with the RTP300. However, I found a workaround for the time being. The issue is with SPI on, regardless of whether you forward all the ports or not, the calls are choppy. When I turn SPI off, the problem disappears. Not the best solution but it'll work for now. The cheaper routers don't even have SPI. Maybe a future firmware update will resolve it and I can turn it back on.

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Apr 24, 2006 Posts: 4

Argh. It looks like my periodic packet loss was due to the NIC in my Linux box. Sad

Booooo! I threw another cheap NIC in it, and it's been performing flawlessly over the last hour. Let's see if it can stand the test of time, but I've not seen lossless traffic in many months. I hate it when the problem is my own, but a fix is worth the humility in this case.

Posts: 1715 · Posted: Sat Jun 24, 2006 11:45 am Post subject:

Maz: There's been a few consumer routers which hose things when SPI is enabled, doesn't necessarily surprise me.

tfo: Um...isn't a cheap nic how you ran into this problem to begin with? Smile

Posts: 170 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Dec 05, 2004 Posts: 170

VonageTPA, yeah, it's really no big deal though. I wanted SPI, but I'm running Windows OneCare firewall also, so between that and the NAT on the NetGear, I should have enough protection. In the future, I may request a second Internet IP address and put the Vonage adapter outside the firewall, but it's not worth the trouble right now.

Maaz

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Apr 24, 2006 Posts: 4

VonageTPA wrote:

tfo: Um...isn't a cheap nic how you ran into this problem to begin with? Smile

Tis a good point. However, there are plenty of cheaply priced NICs that are of reasonably good quality. I've got stacks of them, and most shouldn't skip a beat. Once replaced, though, I'm still dropping occasional packets. Probably 50% improvement. A bit odd, but you could be quite right. I'll stock up on some gigabit NICs in the near future, and give it another go.

Posts: 170 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Dec 05, 2004 Posts: 170

For what it's worth, I figured I'd provide a final update. As time went on, I found that I was still having various problems with my Comcast connection. The new router seemed to solve the problem initially, but Comcast still became very slow at times and sometimes unusable. Basically, the frequency of the problem was reduced but not eliminated.

I ran the Voip Speed Test on this website at various times of the day for a few days. The speed was always good (up to 15 MB/725k) but the Quality of Service ranged only from 40% to 70%. Sometimes my Vonage service worked okay and other times it was choppy.

I called Comcast to report the problem. I managed to get them on the phone at a time when my connection was bad and they acknowledged a problem. However, they just came and checked my wiring, and there were no issues and the connection was working good at the time they came. The next day, the problems resumed.

Not wanting to deal with the situation any longer, I ordered Verizon DSL. I never realized that they offered naked DSL until now. The price is $34.95 a month (with no landline) instead of the $42.95 I was paying with Comcast which required me to have cable TV. The DSL was a little tricky to set up because the Westell modem they sent was really a router (with 1 port). I had to disable DHCP and enable bridge mode on it to get rid of the NAT. Then there was still an internal IP address conflict with my Netgear router as they both wanted to use 192.168.1.1 so I had to change the IP on the Netgear as well as the external IP on the RTP300.

I'm now getting a Quality of Service of up to 99%. In fact, I haven't seen anything below 96% yet. In addition, the upload speed is about 725k as well, the fastest I've seen on an ADSL connection. The only thing that is slower is the download speed which is just below 3 MB but web pages seem to load faster because the connection is more constant and speeds are more consistant rather than variable. Vonage seems to be working quite well too. The next day I stopped by Comcast's office to cancel their service and return the modem. The 8-15 MB download speed was nice for big downloads but not worth the cost of reliability. Apparently their network is garbage.

Maaz