Wireless Networks and Vonage

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: Sep 09, 2005 Posts: 1

I live is a valley that does not have access to broadband so a local geek installed a T-1 and a wireless network for the valley and he sells access. The highspeed internet is great with no complaints. It will not work with Vonage!
The telephone conversation is frequently interupted with drop out and technical support can not fix the problem. We have set the bandwidth to the lowest setting and it still sound like crap!
So even if you have high speed bandwidth test, it still does not mean that the Vonage service will work! If someone can help??? Please respond. Otherwise...don't waste your time with Vonage if you are on a wireless network!

Posts: 1178 · Member of the Week Joined: Feb 28, 2005 Posts: 1178

Lursen,

I can understand your frustration to a certain extent. However, I believe the information on vonage.com makes clear that wireless networks are not supported because of other issues such as latency and packet loss. This is also very much the situation with those who use satellite access for internet.

In your situation, the broadband speed test is only one aspect of which latency and packet loss are also very important aspects. Any significant issues with any of these three would result in crappy voice connections. In addition, because it's a wireless network, the number of users on the system would adversely affect the connection.

hope this helps.

Posts: 38 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Jul 28, 2005 Posts: 38

I disagree with most of what mundy say's except the last part. Other users are probably what is causing you the most problems.

Let me give you a scenario. My company is a small dial-up and wireless ISP in Iowa. We have a dedicated T1 to the Internet that is shared by about 20 of our wireless customers. Recently I decided it would be neat to do some playing arround so I took a Linksys WET11 over to our broadcast tower and connected up wirelessly to our service. I then connected my Vonage box to the WET11 and was able to get dialtone. Thinking this was pretty cool, I started to drive arround a little bit. Our omni's are on top of a watertower in our community which gives you an idea of their elevation. I was able to get about 8 blocks in one direction before I started to suffer problems with call quality.

The moral of the story? A properly configured wireless network fully supports VOIP including Vonage. However, a T1 (1.54 Mbps), can at best support about 17 high quality VOIP connections with no other traffic on it. Depending on how many users your local wireless provider supports it is quite likely that they are saturating the T1. With simple web browsing or the like, this is not important as you are usually willing to wait a few extra seconds for your web page to come up or a few extra minutes for your download. With VOIP however any delay means poor or unusable audio. QOS is supposed to take care of this but it is still very much in it's infancy in design and implementation.

My recommendation to you might be to give it a try at a known slow time, maybe in the middle of the night or early morning, to see if it is any better. In any case it is probably likely you will not be a good candidate as a VOIP customer until your ISP does some upgrades.

Hope this experience helped.

Posts: 1178 · Member of the Week Joined: Feb 28, 2005 Posts: 1178

E-Gads,

thank you for the informative experience. I suppose, in a perfect environment a wireless system would work flawlessly but in most normal environments, it will unlikely deliver a good connection.

Posts: 1715 · Posted: Sat Sep 10, 2005 10:22 am Post subject:

Wireless can work. I've used 802.11B (not even G) with my Vonage adapter. It mainly depends on how much bandwidth is being used by otehr users. Of course, reception problems will also limit your connectivity. As I've said in other posts, all it takes is one bozo running BitTorrent or other peer-to-peer software to kill a connection. Maybe you can talk your provider into giving your VoIP traffic high priority, which would help, if not "cure" the problem if it's related to not enough bandwidth on the T1.