Dual WAN Router and Vonage

Posts: 17 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Feb 10, 2005 Posts: 17

Dual WAN routers are an evolving technology... One thing to understand is that the way it receives and sends data across the internet is not Voip friendly. This makes it impossible to truly "load balance" Voip traffic.

The current setup I run is nothing better than connecting two of our Vonage routers to each of our DSL lines (with the added benefit of fail-over in case one DSL line goes bad). There is no load balancing on the Vonage lines, but there is on any other internet traffic (web, ftp, etc).

Each Vonage adapter is setup with a static IP and something called "loose binding" to one WAN connection. The static IP setup is not needed, but I found that it helped the speed of the network reboot (like 5 vs 30 seconds). The "Loose binding" option sets traffic from a device to go through a specific WAN port. When the selected WAN port becomes unavailable, it fails-over to the other one.

Load balancing setup page: All web traffic is set to load balance by IP address (I did this so that pages that require log-ins or security always come through the same IP address they originated on)

Host IP setup page: Here I assigned all Vonage routers (and one server) static IPs. This is also where you select whether each adapter prefers a WAN connection or not.

QoS policy setup page: I got lazy here and made (most of) the adapters' ports have priority queueing (UDP and TCP. TCP isn't required, but I didn't know at the time I was setting this up)... This probably isn't recommended by anyone, but I didn't feel like typing in all the separate port ranges.

All this info is specific to the Xincom DPG503. there are a few different ways Voip can work on this router, this is just one setup. the Xincom website has a different approach: http://www.xincom.com/support/voip_support.html

I hope this info helped someone out. Very Happy

Posts: 2 · Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2005 3:08 pm Post subject:

Thanx...mine is setup similar...I was having problems with the other party not hearing us. I think it wasn't binding to one WAN and I have put in a few entries to make sure that happens.

I used STRICT BINDING in the Host IP section:

In the Custom Virtual Server List :
State Server Name Server IP Protocol LAN Port Range WAN Port Range Interface Binding
Enabled Vonage 192.25.25.150 UDP 5060 ~ 5061 5060 ~ 5061 WAN 1
Enabled Vonage2 192.25.25.150 UDP 10000 ~ 20000 10000 ~ 20000 WAN 1

And in QoS I did this:
Policy Name Source Address / Port Destination Address / Port Protocol Queue
Voip2 192.25.25.150 ~ 192.25.25.150 (10000-20000) 0.0.0.0 ~ 0.0.0.0 (10000-20000) UDP High
Voip 192.25.25.150 ~ 192.25.25.150 (5060-5061) 0.0.0.0 ~ 0.0.0.0 (5060-5061) UDP High

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Apr 30, 2005 Posts: 4

Whats the difference between this router and the DPG502? Will the 502 work just as good with Vonage? Also what about email if you have Cable and DSL is there a way to set it so email will only use one of the connections?

Thanks.

-Joe

Posts: 227 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Dec 10, 2004 Posts: 227

One other thing to consider when working with Dual WAN/LB on your routers. Not only does the Router/Firewall/HE have to support BGP but your ISP DOES ALSO. If your ISP does not support BGP than any active sessions on 1 IP address will not automtatically cut-over to the other. There is no way for the traffic to know to re-route itself to your other connection so it will be dropped. Outgoing traffic, of course, will automatically re-route.

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Apr 30, 2005 Posts: 4

bbtrumpetguy wrote:

One other thing to consider when working with Dual WAN/LB on your routers. Not only does the Router/Firewall/HE have to support BGP but your ISP DOES ALSO. If your ISP does not support BGP than any active sessions on 1 IP address will not automtatically cut-over to the other. There is no way for the traffic to know to re-route itself to your other connection so it will be dropped. Outgoing traffic, of course, will automatically re-route.

How do you find that out? I have Comcast Cable and SBC Yahoo DSL.

-Joe

Posts: 227 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Dec 10, 2004 Posts: 227

ZaphodJoe wrote:

bbtrumpetguy wrote:

One other thing to consider when working with Dual WAN/LB on your routers. Not only does the Router/Firewall/HE have to support BGP but your ISP DOES ALSO. If your ISP does not support BGP than any active sessions on 1 IP address will not automtatically cut-over to the other. There is no way for the traffic to know to re-route itself to your other connection so it will be dropped. Outgoing traffic, of course, will automatically re-route.

How do you find that out? I have Comcast Cable and SBC Yahoo DSL.

-Joe

You have to call and ask both ISPs. I'm almost certain Comcast does NOT support BGP. The only reason I know this is because my company offers Managed Services (SonicWALL, Monitoring, Remote Support, etc) and we are expanding so we need to have redundant ISPs. Comcast does not support BGP (for business in my area anyway so I assume that would trickle down to home users as well) and it's actually difficult to find one that does.
Since the Vonage is a 2-way communication, I wonder if it's necessary? I have had many phone conversations interrupted by traffic issues (in 1 case my cable service dropped off for about 30 seconds) and the party on the other line didn't hang up. Believe it or not, my Vonage adapter re-established the conversation shortly after my service came back online. So, because your LAN connection would know to fail-over to the other ISP I wonder if it would renegotiate the conversation. If you have it set up try it sometime while in a conversation, disconnet 1 WAN connection and see how everything resolves (or doesn't). Please post the results if you would! Thanks.

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Apr 30, 2005 Posts: 4

I don't see why you would need that BGP thing, if you can set the Dual Wan router to only use WAN 1 for the Vonage Adapter then the Vonage adapter would sign into Vonage on the wan1 ip so all incoming calls should be sent to the wan1 ip. If Vonage doesn't see the second IP they should not be sending any incoming calls to that ip at all. I just hope it works. I know it wouldn't work with the Edimax router I just tried so I am returning that for this one.

-Joe

Posts: 227 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Dec 10, 2004 Posts: 227

ZaphodJoe wrote:

I don't see why you would need that BGP thing, if you can set the Dual Wan router to only use WAN 1 for the Vonage Adapter then the Vonage adapter would sign into Vonage on the wan1 ip so all incoming calls should be sent to the wan1 ip. If Vonage doesn't see the second IP they should not be sending any incoming calls to that ip at all. I just hope it works. I know it wouldn't work with the Edimax router I just tried so I am returning that for this one.

-Joe

I guess I misunderstood your intentions. Sorry. I thought you were trying to setup dual WAN/Failover for your Vonage service. If you don't use this then yes, you would NOT need to worry about BGP.