Diagnosing and fixing QoS issues

Posts: 21 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: May 20, 2005 Posts: 21

They're sending me a refurbished motorola vt2442 right now. Since I don't need the extra ports, I'm going to call them back and see about a v-portal instead.

Don't know if that's going to solve my issue, but they really cooked this thing. The routing functions are just hosed.

Posts: 229 · Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2008 7:42 pm Post subject:

If they're sending you a refurbished VT2442 w/o charge, then they may not offer you the free V-Portal. Sorry, I was misunderstanding your previous post to mean that they were offering only to reimburse you for the purchase of a new device.

Posts: 21 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: May 20, 2005 Posts: 21

Been an interesting day...

Actually, that's where they started - was the retail router thing, then, after they toasted the rtp300, they said they'd send me a replacement free. But when they sent me the order confirmation, it was vt2442. In the mean time, I wanted something operational, so I went to Best Buy and bought a Vonage adapter.

But when I called Vonage to get the new adapter hooked up, they told me that they have an "automatic upgrade" from the 2442 to a v-portal - so I'm supposed to get a v-portal after all.

Got that hooked up and in the mean time found out that when wideopenwest upgraded me, they should've upgraded my cable modem as well. So they downgraded me back to my old speed temporarily until they get me the new modem.

Now here's the interesting part...

With the new v-portal hooked up, I have no more issues with phone quality during downloading! Yay! However...the reason is it takes everything else off line! The news transfers go to zero and even web browsing acts like it's on dial up! I tried playing with the QoS settings, but not too much yet. Anyone seen this kind of behavior or have an idea of how to resolve it? At least I can get my phone calls now though...

Posts: 229 · Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2008 9:00 pm Post subject:

Yes, it's a common complaint that when using the phone itself the network speed on other attached devices drops like a rock.

I spent two hours w/ a Vonage tech trying to sort out my V-Portal issues, and eventually a pair of factory resets from within the V-Portal web interface resolved it. After that the quality was nice enough that I wasn't compelled to mess w/ the QoS settings any further, but you will probably have to play with it a little.

Posts: 21 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: May 20, 2005 Posts: 21

Seems to be now, after playing with the QoS settings a bit more, that the web surfing (what everyone else does in the house Very Happy

) is okay but the news traffic drops out completely. Frankly, that's quite liveable. I noticed that it calculated my upstrem bandwidth at 1800 or so, yet any speed test (and my provider) tell me it's about 1000. So I set that to manual and it helped.

One thing this does tell me though is that it was the rtp300 all along.

Once I get all this stablilzed with my "final" pieces (new cable modem, eventual Vonage adapter), I may yet put a dd-wrt (or even tomato) based router in front of the v-portal and let it live on it's own branch.

But at least I don't have to shut down things to talk on the phone now.

Posts: 831 · Vonage Forum Evangelist Joined: Jun 08, 2007 Posts: 831

kamnet wrote:

Yes, it's a common complaint that when using the phone itself the network speed on other attached devices drops like a rock.

I spent two hours w/ a Vonage tech trying to sort out my V-Portal issues, and eventually a pair of factory resets from within the V-Portal web interface resolved it. After that the quality was nice enough that I wasn't compelled to mess w/ the QoS settings any further, but you will probably have to play with it a little.

WOW . . . why does the factory setings on the V-portal do this. My VT2142 acts nothing like that. A week or so ago, my wife was talking on the phone and a call came in from my son who was cooling his heels in New Zealand. It was the last call we would get from him for a while as he was heading to Antarctica, so I picked up on Vonage Talk. Had a great connection and her call connection was normal as well. When she finished her call, she used my VT to talk to him while I went to another computer to finsih what I was working on, no degradation of normal internet service at all.

I do have the QOS on the VT2142 set for high priority (throughput, delay and reliability) for the Vonage Talk ports to the network though, but that would be AFTER the built in QOS settings on the ATA.

Posts: 21 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: May 20, 2005 Posts: 21

Well, I've got my v-portal set up. QoS has upload manually set to 768k (I've got 1mb) and the other stuff is all set to high priority. I added a rule specifically for my news downloads and made them low priority.

Now, with a phone call, the V-portal yanks my news downloads waaay down - but not off! If hacks them down to 5mb/s (so, does it just slice off 10MB of bandwidth or what??). But the web browsing and all stay great.

So, if I were to do nothing else, I'd be happy with the way this is working now! I still am thinking very hard about putting another router in front of the v-portal and having the v-portal on it's own and just do QoS via tomato or dd-wrt and use the mac address of the v-portal. I think that would give me exactly everything I need and want.