Working QoS settings WRT54G & Shaw

Posts: 16 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jan 03, 2007 Posts: 16

Great! Does that improve you Vonage actual calls quality?

Posts: 1326 · Vonage Forum **MVM** Joined: Nov 08, 2006 Posts: 1326

My wife was on the phone while I was doing the test, she said it was perfect. There was no dropped call, hissing nor any echo.

I am running my cable modem into the Vonage adaptor and then into the computer. I am not using my wireless connection right now.

Posts: 16 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jan 03, 2007 Posts: 16

Good to hear! When it's working, it's working well!

I just spent over 1.5 hour on the phone with Europe while my daughter was downloading a video on her laptop WiFi. I had one disconnection after about 40 minutes, otherwise perfect quality of voice, as good as a land line.

Posts: 105 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Nov 19, 2005 Posts: 105

When you do port prioritization (recommended) you do not need MAC prioritization as the port prioritization overrides that I believe.

Either that or the firmware is trying to do both if it's not smart enough which would create unnecessary processor utilization. Either way you probably should only be doing port prioritization. It has a higher priority than MAC prioritization and requires the least amount of effort from the router processor so it seems to work better. I use port prioritization exclusively for my Vonage ATA and it seem to work ok. For example, I do a lot of bittorrent downloading/uploading. Without any QoS my calls tend to be quite choppy. With it there are usually no problems. Usually! I use DD-WRT firmware though.

You DO have to set your bandwidth reservation limits correctly otherwise QoS will be useless. Upload and Download should be set to 85% or less of your WORST case speeds. This is VERY important.

Not sure what flow control is doing as DD-WRT does not have option.

Posts: 16 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jan 03, 2007 Posts: 16

I had tried: port priority alone, MAC address priority alone and both at the same time. I could not see any difference so I left all ON to cover any possibility. I can see the point of not overloading the router processing though.

For the upstream bandwidth reserve, I had set-up manually at 85% of worst upload stream but I found that this was affecting my Internet more than if I left the Linksys automatically determine the limit itself. So far, on Auto, I have had no problem at all. I will definitely put back the fixed 85% amount if usage shows that I am getting problems...

Posts: 16 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jan 03, 2007 Posts: 16

I also tried an Hawking HBB1 Broadband Booster. I was unable to demonstrate, in my setup, that it was superior to what I could achieve with the Linksys alone. I know many people and technical reviewers swear that it is way better than the QoS built in some routers but I could not see that by myself.

I bought the HBB1 brand new ($77.22 with tax) a couple of days ago, after waiting for over a week to get one shipped from Ontario. If someone in the Vancouver area wants to buy it, it's available ($65.00, no taxes no shipping cost, pick-up at my place)!

PS: If items for sale are not allowed in this forum, please remove the above paragraph, thanks!

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Jan 30, 2007 Posts: 3

New to Vonage here. I am using the UT Starcom WiFi phone, so I'm wondering how to optimize my QoS settings. Would I simply enable my wireless (WMM) QoS? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Posts: 329 · Vonage Forum Evangelist Joined: Dec 13, 2005 Posts: 329

The wireless QoS settings in the access point would probably not make any difference since that is not likely your bottleneck - unless you have a lot of internal traffic in the house. A WiFi router running at 11mbps will not need WiFi QoS if the connection to the world is via 3mbps cable of 1.5mbps DSL.

On the other hand, if you read some of the other QoS related posts in this forum, you MAY want to prioritize the MAC of the phone to get better treatment going in and out the door. The other choice is to first try the phone and see how it does. I use an F1000 with a Linksys WRT54G on Verizon DSL - with no QoS settings at all on the router and get excellent voice quality on Vonage.

Posts: 16 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jan 03, 2007 Posts: 16

I took my Vonage box with me to Taiwan and used it for a week on a high speed cable (fiber optic) with no QoS at all and it worked wonderfuly well despite having 3 computers online at the same time. That's the same box which gave me problems at home when QoS was not set in the router. So, if you have excellent Internet speed you may not need any QoS at all... but if you do have problems QoS may help significantly.

Posts: 105 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Nov 19, 2005 Posts: 105

Wifi has some inherent limitations that make it a poor fit for things like Voip. I think it has to do with flow control, QoS, etc. I don't think you can really do effective QoS on WiFi. It's a big enough hassle to get wired Voip working.

They created a special wireless technology specifically to address these issues. It's called DECT.