Solo Technology

Here’s something that I found interesting. New router arrived today from Vonage as I had finally convinced them that the one I got last January was a steaming pile of dung. They hate to hear that, apparently, and it took quite a few calls and emails to convince someone to send me a new one. I’m sure the notes on my account said, “If this clown calls back, give him the damned router so he leaves us alone!”

[Whining aside, I should clarify that a bit: I LOVE my Vonage service. It works great and it has saved us gobs of cash. Ok, so things get tense if I fire up some big downloads while the wife is on the phone... but other than that, we love it.]

Anyways, back on topic: Swapping out one older linksys voip router for a newer model linksys voip router netted me, according to vonage’s little benchmarker, almost a full megabit in download speed. Tested the old one yesterday and the new one today. Both about the same time of day. Now granted, there are way too many environmental factors involved here, but still… I was happy.

Although, in one respect, I’m also a bit puzzled. The new router offers QoS settings for everything except voice. That kind of surprised me as the old one not only let me set QoS on voice, but I could also specify bandwidth to “use” towards voice traffic. We’ll see how it works out, but even with all traffic set to low priority I’ve been told my downloads still affect call quality. drat.

[later edit]

To answer a question I got via IM, I have a bit of an odd networking arrangement. It looks kind of like this:

[cable modem] <–> [vonage router] <-DMZ’d-> [Netgear Router] -> PC’s and crusty old WAP (services 2 notebooks and 2 pocket pcs).

So, swapping out one vonage router for another is pretty straight forward. Plug it in, set the DMZ and ready to rock. I don’t rely on them as for NAT or firewall. I originally had the vonage router behind my firewall, but I get better call quality with it out front.

2 Responses to “Routers matter - maybe?”

1. Peter on January 28th, 2006 10:30 am
   

   What does your upload speed measure on Vonage’s little testing tool?

2. » pingback » Solo Technology » Blog Archive » Outages, Apologies, Blame Assignment on April 30th, 2006 7:14 pm
   
   

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