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

[John Broome]

On 10/6/05, Tanner Lovelace <clubjuggler at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I would have done that, but with the MiL showing up to visit, there's
no telling how much phone time she's going to burn.  Plus, if she's on
the phone, then she's not bothering me. :)

> 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.


That's what my priority queuing is for on my firewall.  BT is the
lowest, then outgoing VNC, BF1942,  VoIP traffic and then outgoing SSH
is the king.  :)

I haven't noticed any problems with call quality, and Laura hasn't
mentioned anything about choppy sounding calls.

I just have the linksys ATA, no router.