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Can Any Router Guarantee Bandwidth For VoIP?
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."
QOS should work if you set it up properly.
On my WRT-54GL with Tomato (others might work, Tomato is the easiest of ddwrt, openwrt in my experience), the QOS settings can be limited in just the way you want, with everything except the highest only being allowed only 75% of your upload, or whatever you want.
Downstream is a bit harder to restrict, since the queue is on the Telcom side of things, but you could do some QOS in your router there as well.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Couldn't you do a low heat/low power CPU that doesn't need active cooling, RAM, and a USB thumb-drive to boot off of?
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
I'm not sure how you found your WRT54G lacking in CPU power because on my WRT54G v4, I had actually underclocked it to 183MHz and yet it worked just as well.
I run BitTorrent actively on two separate PCs, and at the same time, we have VoIP and we play delay-sensitive online games.
I did some crucial settings though... like setting the correct upstream and downstream capacities, reducing the TCP and UDP timeouts, and using HFSC as the packet scheduling algorithm (some have reported to try HTB if HFSC fails).
w00t