[sssscary]

Hi, I am considering switching to a new VOIP provider (one of the two mentioned), but my primary focus is call quality and reliability. I am not concerned with the savings offered by switching, nor am worried about the technical setup issues. Bottom line, do you think my wife will complain less about calls having audio breakup issues For the most part, vonage works fine with no issues. Occasionally it seems there is a bad connection and the audio breaks up on both ends. I rarely experience any issues myself, because I don't use it that much. Our internet connection is quite stable, 6000/800 fastpath profile DSL from Bell. Never drops connection and speed always seems to be there, including speed tests.

 

[hugh]

Vonage was excellent for me and I have not had any issues with VoIP.ms

I think if you search the forum, you'll read similar thoughts.

 

[sssscary]

Thanks for the response. I have been reading through many of the related posts. They are very informative. I even discovered I was paying $10 too much a month for Vonage due to the recently introduced cheaper unlimited plan. Now i don't even know if i will bother switching!

 

[hugh]

If there is really is no big savings for you and you're satisfied with Vonage then I'd recommend staying put. Why fix something that isn't broken?

 

[sssscary]

The only reason I would switch is if there were a chance that the quality and reliability would be improved. Or is VOIP an imperfect beast and I should always expect the occasional glitch with any provider. Plus the fun of being able to tweak and configure my own settings, of course

 

[Mango]

VoIP itself is not imperfect and it is not inherently problematic, however it does require a lot of factors to be in order so that it may work properly.

It's likely you're dealing with a bandwidth issue. Is your Vonage device connected directly to your modem? If not, your problem could be solved by a QoS router. If you wish to describe your setup (what equipment do you use and in what order is it connected?) we can see where such an issue might lie.

m.

 

[sssscary]

I have a 2wire DSL modem/router from Bell. I have the PAP2 plugged directly into one of the ports on that. I have a wireless router Dlink dir615 with DD-WRT also plugged into the 2wire for rest of traffic. I have also tried plugging the PAP2 into the router and enabling QOS. I gave the PAP2 "premium" priority by MAC address. The only other setting I put in was to add bittorrent service to "bulk" . Also, I set the upload and download speeds for the QOS.

This did not work well, on the second call I made, there was huge bursts of static. There wasn't really much traffic on the network at this time, (ie no torrents) I put it back to my original configuration.

 

[notsure]

If you are so inclined, try it again with the following changes;
-only plug your dd-wrt router into your dsl modem.
-plug everything else into dd-wrt.
-enable QoS but using the L7 Protocols (not MAC address)... if you are using SIP you need to give rtp and sip premium.
-I would set bittorrent to bulk.
-make sure you have the latest dd-wrt firmware for your router.

This made all the difference for me.

 

[sssscary]

Thanks, I will give that a try.