Lousy test results?

Posts: 12 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Feb 23, 2005 Posts: 12

Okay, I'm new to this whole Voip thing, and if you use too many acronyms my eyes will glaze over, so please go easy on me. I've had Vonage for about a week now and am not a heavy telephone user. At first I thought that the service was pretty good, but lately I hear a kind of hollowness, and when I was talking to someone they said I kept cutting out. I searched this forum and found the test. Here are my results:

My Results
Download 202,280 bps
Upload 229,696 bps
QOS 6%
RTT 82 ms
MaxPause 782 ms
Given your current Internet speeds, we estimate that your Internet connection can support a maximum of 2 simultaneous high quality Vonage® Voip connections.

This is pretty bad, right? Eek

Thing is, I did the test with my wireless connection on my laptop. Will this slow down things? I have a cable connection (Mediacom, which is supposedly capable of 3 Mb download speed and always seemed way fast to me) and a Linksys router.

can anyone give me any idea of what to check or do to increase my scores?

Thanks,
Karen

Posts: 31 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Mar 13, 2005 Posts: 31

Karen,

Testing your bandwidth from a wireless laptop isn't really accurate in this case since the Voip adapter isn't operating wirelessly. You are losing bandwidth over the wireless hop to/from the router. You should, if possible, hard wire your laptop into your wireless router, or the Vonage router and redo the test for accurate results.

Your test results show a pretty good upload speed, but definitely a poor download speed considering your ISP provides you a 3Mbit download stream. I'm guessing you are on 802.11b and you're a fair distance from your Router?

Posts: 12 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Feb 23, 2005 Posts: 12

Ido,
Thanks for the reply. I reran the speed test on a wired pc and here's my results:

Download 2,837,832 bps
Upload 174,456 bps
QOS 95%
RTT 54 ms
MaxPause 170 ms

Given your current Internet speeds, we estimate that your Internet connection can support a maximum of 2 simultaneous high quality Vonage® Voip connections.

This looks significantly better than before (on the laptop) but what's the deal with only supporting 2 connections? I have 4 phones hooked up.I read about a firmeware upgrade to my router (rt31p2) but am unsure if this will help. How can I check to see if I need the upgrade? Furthermore, I never installed any software for the Linksys adapter, just plugged it in.

Thanks again,
Karen

Posts: 31 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Mar 13, 2005 Posts: 31

Karen,

Those stats look much better.
You should be fine supporting only 2 simultaneous connections. When you say you have 4 phones hooked up, I assume they are all using 1 actual Vonage line. Are you using only 1 port on your phone adapter? If so, you are only ever supporting 1 Voip connection at any given time anyway.

As far as firmware, you don't need to worry about upgrading.... it happens automatically.

Posts: 12 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Feb 23, 2005 Posts: 12

Thanks again. So if everything looks okay, is there anything I can do to increase sound quality? I have to admit it has sounded better the past few days, but I can hear a bit of an echo sometimes.

Posts: 482 · Posted: Sat Mar 26, 2005 7:26 pm Post subject:

My Vonage has sounded better the last few days than at any time since I signed up in January. Callers have commented that it sounds "normal" lately (which is kind of sad in a way, but hey, I'll take it).