[TriLUG] Slightly OT:Vonage vs. TWC Phone Service

[Tanner Lovelace]

Matt,

I too have Vonage.  My wife and I decided to go with their $15/month
for 500 minutes plan because we calculated that (assuming
US calls) at 3 cents/minute over that, we'd need to be using the
phone around 850 minutes/month to justify the extra $10 for
an unlimited plan ($10 / 0.03 = 333.33 minutes over the
included 500 minutes).  Since we don't see ourselves
ever coming close to that, we opted for the lower plan.

Our setup is this:

cable modem <-> wrt54gs <-| (voip adapter & rest of network)
I run the latest free Sveasoft firmware (alchemy, I think) on the
wrt54gs and do have QoS enabled.  I had bittorrent set to bulk
status and didn't have any problems with the calls, but bittorrent
basically didn't work at all.  So, I changed it to "standard" priority
(SIP and the ATA's switch port are both set to "premium, iirc)
and now bittorrent works.  I did a bit of testing while downloading
a large bittorrent file and the person on the other end was able to
hear some chopiness before I limited the bittorrent upload speed
to 12 Kbps (Azureus rocks for this, btw).  With that simple
modification both bittorent and the call I was on worked great.
Other than that, I've never had any other problems with it.  It
seems to me that the problem happened when I saturated my
upload bandwidth.  There's plenty of download bandwidth on my
cable modem so I can download anything from a web or ftp
site without having it mess up a phone call, but when doing
bittorrent and voip, both of which use the upstream bandwidth
a lot more than simple web surfing is when I had problems.  So,
based on that, I wouldn't recommend running a heavily used
server if you use Vonage at home, but the majority of people
probably won't fall into that category.

Cheers,
Tanner

On 10/6/05, Matt Pusateri <mpusateri at wickedtrails.com> wrote:
> Triluggers,
>
> I trying to decide on Vonage versus Time Warner Cable's phone service.
>  I have had mixed reviews on both.  Anyone care to share the
> experiences.  From a price perspective Vonage seems more desirable,
> but I don't want to end up in one of those - You get what you pay for
> scenarios.
>
> Also those that are successful in having good quality voip service do
> you have the voip ATA box ahead of you local network or behind.  If
> behind are you doing and QOS.  My setup will most likely involve a
> WRTG54.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Matt P.
>
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--
Tanner Lovelace
clubjuggler at gmail dot com
http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
(fieldless) In fess two roundels in pale, a billet fesswise and an
increscent, all sable.