[TriLUG] best home router for voip prioritization

[John Vaughters]

Dewey,

I will just give you my experience with no recommendation in hopes it helps you. I am a Linux person thru and thru, so I love dd-wrt linux based router solution; been using it for about 5 years on at least 5 routers. The iptables firewall is scriptable via ssh and allows me to do temporary firewall holes from basically anywhere from the internet. I use ssh keys only, so very secure and from my perspective, a temporary hole only allowing from my current ip is much harder to attack, so this is how I manage my access. 

Back to the sip experience. I have used Magic Jack for years and NetTalk for a year and I prioritize them by ip or mac address, but you can prioritize by protocol as well. It works great at my house, but when I recently set up an OBI202 with google voice for my dad at his house with low upload bandwidth we had issues. The prioritization did not work well and I tried MAC, IP, Protocol of which none worked well. Oh BTW I have his router is set up with dd-wrt as well. With OBI202, we ended up putting it in front of the router and opening it up fully to the dd-wrt router. This worked best. I am not sure why the prioritization had an issue, but OBI202 says it is best to place in front of the router and OBI202 will prioritize. From a security perspective I am not thrilled with the solution, but it was the only way to get it to work because of bandwidth. I did not have time to analyze the traffic to figure out why this was the best config, so I cannot explain
 the reason. Maybe another day I will evaluate the situation closer.

Having said that, I will continue to use dd-wrt for security, low cost and ease of use. I am a huge fan of linux based routers. I know this may sound like a recommendation, but I understand people like to use what is best for them and dd-wrt is best for me. I use it to connect to family via WAN VPN links as well. Very convenient for helping family troubleshoot.

Good Luck!

John Vaughters