Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Can Any Router Guarantee Bandwidth For VoIP?

Posted by timothy on from the garbly-in-garbly-out dept.

cartman94501 writes "My wife and I use Vonage for Voice over IP at home, mainly for work-related phone calls so we don't have to give out our home number to clients and colleagues. Most of the time it works fine, but when I'm using BitTorrent or other high-bandwidth applications (purely for legal and non-copyright-violating purposes, of course), the call quality gets choppy. I have used my Linksys (not a WRT54G, so 'upgrading' it to Linux probably won't work) router's QoS feature to assign high priority to the MAC address of the Vonage box, low priority to the BitTorrent box, and medium quality to everything else, which helps a little, but not enough. Is there a router out there that would allow me to reserve, say, 75-90kbps of bandwidth off the top for VoIP and never, ever allow any application to use that, regardless of whether there's a VoIP call going on at the moment or not?" (More below) cartman 94501 continues: "That would solve my problem, but I fear I'd have to build a Linux box and learn all sorts of esoteric commands to really make that work. Are you aware of a commercially-available router that would allow me to accomplish this goal with some sort of ease? While I'm not prepared to pay four figures, I'm certainly not naïve enough to expect such a device to be available in the $50-100 range of your garden-variety wireless router. Wireless would be ideal, but if I could patch it in between my existing wireless router and the cable modem, and turn off QoS entirely on the existing router, that would work, too."

6 of 414 comments (clear)

  1. Gaming Router by seanalltogether · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Most gaming routers allow for this kind of functionality. In fact the first search result on google for 'gaming router' brought me to a product from dlink that provided exactly that.

    1. Re:Gaming Router by Binestar · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You can just get the Vonage Linksys: WRT54GP2. Has built in vonage and QOS for it.

      --
      Do you Gentoo!?
  2. Get another internet connection by fat_mike · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you're running a business, your first worry should be about servicing your customers not using Bittorent. Get another DSL/Cable/Wifi connection for your business and run your VOIP over that.

    If you only need the limited bandwidth that you are looking for you'd be fine with the lowest speed (read cheapest) connection any ISP offered.

  3. ISP to blame? by jrronimo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I have heard that most ISPs put VOIP packets on super-low priority anyway, so even your setup at home won't affect it a whole lot. I may have heard wrong, though.

  4. It's not your router... by acvolt · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The problem is related to the amount of traffic coming to you from the internet. No amount of QoS applied to your router will be able to shape the traffic that is piling up against the provider's side of the link to your house. That leaves you with 2 options:
    1. If your BitTorrent client supports it, set the maximum download rate to less than what your internet connection speed is. I won't guarantee this will completely solve the issue, but it should help.
    2. Don't download big files while you are using your VoIP phone.

  5. Re:QOS should work by wolf12886 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I wish I had mod points today, most people don't understand this, and wonder why even throttled BT kills their connections.