using vonage over seas + softphone discussion

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Dec 15, 2004 Posts: 4

so i currently am a student studying in shanghai china right now and am trying to get my Vonage service to work over here... i have a dsl line provided by china telecom rated at 2048/512 kbps. doing speed tests to/from local speedtest servers in china tells me that this advertised speed is nearly correct. i get an average of 1750/450 of actual throughput. the problem exists when information travels from china to the United States. my ping times within china are under 50 ms anywhere, but once i cross the pacific, they jump to about 400 ms at the lowest. to vonage's servers, they are about 500-550ms. check out www.charliechrisman.com/vonage.html for information on ping times and packet loss to and from me to the Vonage servers. when testing my bandwidth to various government/educational servers around the US, i was getting between 20-40 kbps upstream and 500-1750 kbps downstream. i know i can complain to china telecom (and others in china) to try and improve these problems, but i know how the system works here, nothing will change for quite a while. regardless, im trying.

so the problem im trying to understand, is why my softphone (on my laptop) is working just fine, but the linksys rt31p2 router with a phone plugged into it isn't working at all. i managed once to get a dialtone and place a call, but as soon as i hung up, i was unable to get a dialtone again. and haven't since gotten a dial tone. but all the while, my softphone has been working just fine. i turned on the bandwidth saver on my Vonage account and waited all night and rebooted my router, etc, but to no avail. still didn't work. anyone have any thoughts?

Posts: 14 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Nov 26, 2004 Posts: 14

Sorry to hear about your problems. I would be pretty annoyed myself if it didn't work for me. FWIW, I am in Beijing now staying at the St. Regis hotel which offers broadband access in all their guestrooms. I was able to plug in my Vonage box and the hotel phone into the Vonage box and it has worked no problem. The only issue that recently came up over the last three days is the speakerphone doesn't work properly anymore (this is the type of phone which gets power from the phone line itself).

Vonage has also worked for me in Shanghai. Although I didn't run any of the tests you did (although I do understand all of them, since I once used to be a router and unix jockey). This was while I was staying at the Westin Shanghai.

You can read about my experience here:
http://www.vonage-forum.com/ftopic2116.html

Last but not least, how do you handle the problem of voltage? The linksys I have is only 110v; had the hotel had a transformer to lend me, I would have been out of luck!

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Dec 15, 2004 Posts: 4

ive not had a chance to test my vonage/linksys router on any other kind of internet connection here, so i don't know what else to expect. as for the voltage, i just went to one of the many electronics stores and told them i needed a power adapter that could to 12V and at least 1A. they sold me one that did 12V and 1.2A, but since having more than enough amerage won't hurt anything, it works fine. also (obviously) because i bought it at a chinese store, its input voltage was that of china. 50Hz 220V etc...