New Firmware 1.00.45

Posts: 159 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Aug 05, 2005 Posts: 159

Trowski - yeah even with all those IM clients, outlook and Centra session that's still not going to be enough to clog the toilet if you know what I mean. That won't come close to consistently taxing your upload stream. Shove a bounty papertowl in the toilet and see how it flushes. Smile

ErikaS - you have to join the secret firmware club. Make check payable to....... Just kidding. Firmware updates come automatically from Vonage seemingly on Fridays (every other). Or... You can call Vonage customer service and ask them to push you the latest firmware v1.00.45. Supposedly soon (hopefully by the end of the week) new firmware will be coming to address the reverse echo echo issue. In the meantime, when people that call you complain of an echo, just tell them it's all in their head.

I can recommend a good Vonage marriage counselor. Wink

Posts: 12 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Sep 06, 2005 Posts: 12

Hi KP-
I called Vonage & they told me how to check my router firmware info. They said that they updated my firmware on 9/4. A check showed that I already have v1.00.45. I asked about any new updates & they were ambivelent, but suggested that I used thier bandwidth saver to try to stop the echo. So I'm going to set it to the middle setting & see what happens.

If making this change does anything, I'll post it.

Posts: 159 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Aug 05, 2005 Posts: 159

ErikaS - that may help but the real issue appears to be in the firmware confirmed by the top tier Vonage tech support. They were going to include the echo echo fix in v1.00.45 but apparently they didn't get a chance to do their full QA testing so they delayed it for the next release. Hope that helps!

Posts: 40 · Full Forum Member Joined: Jul 03, 2005 Posts: 40

kpdillon wrote:

Trowski - yeah even with all those IM clients, outlook and Centra session that's still not going to be enough to clog the toilet if you know what I mean. That won't come close to consistently taxing your upload stream. Shove a bounty papertowl in the toilet and see how it flushes.

Just wanted to agree... Trowski, I'm not sure what your file-sharing-with-the-instructor setup is, but unless you're using close 700Kbps upload with that app you're not going to come close to maxing that ridiculous 900Kbps upload speed you have. The most reliable and simplest way I know of tapping out your upload bandwidth is to upload a large file to http://yousendit.com (as kpdillon already mentioned). It really is trivial to start--it takes longer just to browse to a large file than it does to actually get the file transfer going, the site is that simple.

Posts: 1389 · Posted: Wed Sep 07, 2005 5:51 am Post subject:

I will give that a whirl today and lets you see what happens. what size file would you suggest?

Posts: 12 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Sep 06, 2005 Posts: 12

Hi KP-

Using the Vonage bandwidth saver seems to have helped w/ the echo w/o messing w/ voice quality. I thought that maybe we were having a delay problem too, but that seems to have gone away (for now).

I'm also in the process of addressing some dropped signal issues with my cable connection, & hope to resolve or at least diagnose some things early next week (basically, I've been getting dropped at random times, & the problem is totally sporadic).

KP- Since the v1.00.45 firmware was updated on 9/4 w/o my knowledge (or consent!), can I assume that if & when this "fixed" firmware is out, that it will magically be installed on my router? I'll admit, I'm annoyed that such things are happening w/o my knowledge.

thanks!

Posts: 159 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Aug 05, 2005 Posts: 159

Hi ErikaS, thanks for sharing your update/experience thus far. Your Router is configured to poll a vonage tftp server every 24 hours or on boot up of the router. Therefore if they put out a new firmware image your router will grab it with you having much of a choice. Friday/Saturday is the time frame that they seem to be doin this.

I agree - it's no ideal but you can take a little comfort in that TI (the makers of the chip and the ones working on the firmware for Linksys & Vonage seem to have a pretty strict QA process. Not that it's been perfect to date, but the general consensus seems to be that the RTP300 was released to early.

Hope that helps.

KP Smile

Posts: 12 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Sep 06, 2005 Posts: 12

Hi KP-
Thanks for the explanation/insight into how these things work. Its a steep learning curve!

For now everything's working & my marriage is saved! Very Happy

As soon as I see a new version of the firmware, I'll be setting the bandwidth saver back to "high quality" & see how it all works. And I'll be sure to come a'cryin' here if it ain't workin'.

I'm just chomping at the bit to tell Verizon to go take a leap (but I can't do that until I'm sure that Vonage will perform). $33/month just for a dial tone! For shame! Evil or Very Mad

Posts: 40 · Full Forum Member Joined: Jul 03, 2005 Posts: 40

Trowski wrote:

I will give that a whirl today and lets you see what happens. what size file would you suggest?

You just want something that will be big enough that the transfer won't finish while you're doing your testing. Since you're at just over 0.1 MBytes/s upload, it should take a little under 10 seconds for you to upload 1 MB. So I'd suggest at least 10MB, but 100MB or more would be best (yousendit will take up to 1GB file). You don't actually need to let the transfer complete, you just want it going while you're testing your outgoing voice quality while maxing out your upload. Indeed, if you want to "turn off" your transfer it's usually enough to just hit the back button of your browser once or twice. And if you browse back to the main page you should probably have the email and file fields remembered, so you can re-do the upload at any time, making it easy to test on and off.

If you can't find a large file you can always just zip a bunch of files together to create a big one.

To watch your network bandwidth usage (assuming only one computer is active and it's running Win XP/2K) I find it simplest to open the task manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc) and click on the Networking tab. Assuming you have a 100 Mbps LAN connection to your router or Vonage adapter then 1% network utilization would correspond to 1000 Kbps. Thus I'd expect you to see about 0.9% network utilization (to see Sent vs. Received bandwdith separately you may want to go to View->Select Columns and check off Bytes Sent and Received Throughput... I also prefer having the graph show only Sent and Receive but not total, which you adjust via View->Network Adapter History.

What you should see is a total of just under 1% on the graph with no phone lines active, and then when one becomes active it should drop down about 0.1% (1% = 1Mbps, 1 Mbps * 0.1 = 100Kbps, ~ the badwidth of a Vonage call0 to somewhere around 0.8. Don't confuse this dropoff with good QoS, however. The mechanics of TCP connections (such as the connection you'll have to yousendit for the file transfer) are such that the TCP connection should always back off. However it will likely do a saw-tooth wiggle after it drops off as it continually hunts for the bandwidth limit.

I'm very curious to find out if your outgoing voice quality will stay the same if you're actually maxing out your upload bandwidth limit before the phone call starts. In my WRTP54G experience (with every firmware along the way) the outgoing voice quality regularly breaks during every single phone in which a computer is competing for the upload bandwidth.

Posts: 177 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Jul 22, 2005 Posts: 177

I know I'm ready for the echo fix. My wife just called me from her cellphone and said she could hear the echo of her own voice.

C'mon Vonage/TI/Linksys!!! Smile