College dorm rooms

Posts: 5 · Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2003 12:07 pm Post subject: College dorm rooms

Anyone out there know if Vonage will work at a University dorm room with 4 studends... Not sure of the set up but they do have ethernet access in the room. Any info is helpfull..... Very Happy

Posts: 40 · Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2003 6:56 pm Post subject:

Well ... it should work...

But ...

... As you can tell from this forum, there a lot a pretty technically savy folks out there who tinker w/ their own hardware setup to get things working (usually).

As the ethernet drop is already provided to your room, then someone else is admintering your LAN. Firewalls can be set to be so porous as to almost be non-existant ,all the way to the opposite extreme.

I would suspect a dorm LAN is fairly "loose" enough to let Vonage work. If not, work w/ your system admin folks FAST, and if it still doesn't work send everything back to Vonage within their guarantee ... no harm done.

Posts: 5 · Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2003 11:05 pm Post subject:

Thanks for your response. I am a network engineer and I'm very familiar with Network topology.

What I'm looking for here is info from someone that has had experience with VOIP/SIP and a Cisco ATA186 or ATA188 at a University dorm room... Vonage experience would really be good info.. I have clients that are sending there children to College and they want to save a buck or two.. Very Happy

Posts: 6 · New Forum Member Joined: Aug 04, 2003 Posts: 6

My guess is that the dorm network is likely to be Vonage unfriendly either because of firewall restrictions (good luck finding a sympathetic sys-admin if this is the case) or because of cirtuit saturation. Internet circuits serving dorms are very often saturated from thousands of IM sessions, downloads, file sharing, etc.

I'd try it, though... either take an existing Vonage account's ATA there to try or use Vonage's speed test once they get there (try it several times at different times of day/night to get a feel for when Vonage may/may not work well).

Posts: 6 · Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2003 7:22 pm Post subject:

Seems that an unlimited night/weekend cell plan would do the trick a bit better. Most colleges have pretty good cell coverage.

Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2003 8:20 pm Post subject:

I'll take an ATA up to one of the campus's near me and test it out... Then I can report back my findings.

The cell phone is fine but the anytime minutes are always the killer in most cell plans.... These kids stay on the phone all day, never concerned about using up the Anytime minutes.. Nites and weekends are ok....

Guest

I bought the Vonage for my daughter to take to college and have found that it works when it wants to...Today it is not working and she has no dial tone. Later tonight it might just start working. What I did was forward her calls to her dorm room phone, when the network is down (when her ATA is down) then at least she can still receive calls.
I tried to talk with the net admin at the school, but he was unco operative.
Am looking to find a way to make it work. Any suggestions would be appriciated.

Posts: 3

You may have difficulty in getting a DHCP IP number into the ATA. At my university, you can't DHCP unless you go to a special website using the ethernet device to login and register the MAC address; that can't be easily done with the ATA. I also suspect the University IT people would take a dim view of using up university bandwidth for VoIP. Since I am paying my ISP for my internet access at home, I consider it mine to do with what I want--- not so in a dorm room where it is provided by the university as an academic resource.

Posts: 43 · Posted: Fri Jun 18, 2004 11:07 pm Post subject:

If you're looking for a long-distance solution (our college provides local phone service for free), the cheapest way to go is phonecards.

Because I'm considering keeping Vonage when I move back on campus this fall, I brought my ATA and a phone to the computer lab and proceeded to subject my favourite test subject--voicemail-- to a call.

The results were fun but not necessarily functional: Things would go fine for a few seconds. Then, everything would cut out for a few seconds. Then, it would all "catch up" by playing superfast until it got back to where it should have been. This continued, along with some general choppiness.

I can't say that our network would support Vonage in any practical capacity, although you could still use its network availability function to fwd calls. This obviously doesn't work unless your number (or virtual number) is local to your caller. (My parents' area code has yet to be added).

I don't really expect it to help, but I'm planning to try it again, with the ATA behind my router. It does alright there at home, so I don't see where it can hurt things.. but I don't think it will help either. I'll bet our school's firewall is to blame..and I agree that our network admins will love the idea of me sucking up even more of their preciously-guarded bandwidth.

Posts: 29 · Posted: Sat Jun 19, 2004 7:27 am Post subject:

mas90guru wrote:

Seems that an unlimited night/weekend cell plan would do the trick a bit better. Most colleges have pretty good cell coverage.

....if you can tolerate the sound quality on a cell phone