'High level" tech question regarding QOS w/ Vonage

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Oct 13, 2007 Posts: 4

Vonage phone device: Motorola VT2442
Router: Netgear FVS124G
Connection(s): DSL + Cable

First off, my DSL isn't up and running yet but I have heard that VOIP does not work with round-robin packet scheduling on load balancing routers. It is possible to bind the protocol to one WAN port, which is my intention. However, that is another question for another day.

Currently I have set up the following QOS rules for Vonage:

53 UDP
21 UDP
69 UDP
2400 UDP
80 UDP (is this really necessary for voice quality or just reporting?)
123 UDP
10050-10150 TCP/UDP

These are both inbound (forwarded to the Motorola device's static IP that I set) and outbound rules. Tech support on the phone told me my device only uses ports 10050-10150 as opposed to 10k-20k as seen in some devices.

Are these all of the ports used by Vonage and my Motorola VT2442?

Bonus question: Has anyone had good experiences trying to bind Vonage communication to one LAN port in a dual WAN network?

Thanks all, I will check this post periodically for information.
ateo

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Oct 13, 2007 Posts: 4

Anyone have port info?

Posts: 52 · Full Forum Member Joined: Jan 10, 2007 Posts: 52

Usually the Vonage device will use 5060, 5061, and 10k-20k for RTP. That's about all of the port information that is important.

As far as using dual WAN ports and trying to setup QoS rules, you're on your own.

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Oct 13, 2007 Posts: 4

TCP or UDP? Especially the 5000 range ports.

Posts: 52 · Full Forum Member Joined: Jan 10, 2007 Posts: 52

Streaming audio = UDP

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Oct 13, 2007 Posts: 4

I don't think these are all of the ports used by vonage.

I set my firewall to block all outgoing traffic by default and had the following ports allowed through (outgoing):

UDP 53
UDP 21
UDP 69
UDP 2400
UDP 5060-5061
UDP 123
TCP/UDP 10050-10150

After doing that my phone lost its connection to the vonage network. When I allowed all outgoing traffic again, it regained the connection.

Therefore, some ports are being used that I am not aware of.

What ports?

Posts: 80 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Oct 24, 2007 Posts: 80

One issue might be that you set TCP/UDP 10050-10150

Vonage uses 10000-20000. You may be set to 15050 and 15150 if so, you would have blocked your phone.

You can check out www.portforward.com if you want more information on forwarding ports and which ports to forward.

On the homepage just click on Guides, then go to the Port Forwarding section.

Additionally, if you are having problems faxing with you vonage, you can check out www.voipfrustration.com

Posts: 533 · Posted: Wed Nov 07, 2007 11:29 am Post subject:

You're pretty far off on those ports. Let's take a step back. First, you don't need to port forward anything for Vonage, all communications are initiated from your Vonage device, so there is no need for forwarding anything.

As far as QoS, again, all you need to do is setup outbound QoS...inbound (from the Internet) will do nothing for you. I don't know where you're performing the QoS or what device you're doing it on, but you should apply QoS to the following:

UDP 5060 and 5061 (SIP traffic. Some devices use 5060, some use 5061)
UDP 10000-20000 (RTP audio)

RTP audio should be guaranteed 90Kbps and SIP about 20Kbps (that's probably even too much, but you can start there). When I say "guaranteed", that means under conditions of congestion. That means your QOS router must have accurate numbers for what your upload speed is on your broadband circuit. If it thinks your upload speed is 10MBps, but it's actually 384Kbps, QoS will never kick in because it won't think the circuit is overloaded.

As far as load-balancing routers and VoIP. What you heard was not at all true. That happens every day to all of us out on the Internet.

If you want to guarantee all your outbound VoIP traffic traverses one and only one circuit, you can do that but it depends on your setup. If you want to ensure your VoIP traffic exists only one of the two circuits, you're pretty much going to need a device that supports PBR (policy based routing).