VOIP arriving

Published by

rich

16 December 2002

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things. This is a neat geek site for interesting gadgets and a multiuser site. Here’s a note from Clay Shirky about VoIP. I have to give it a try!

I have been testing Vonage’s VoIP service, and it comes close to the critical mix of simple, useful, and cheap. The key difference between Vonage and previous “You computer is your phone!” models is that now your phone can be your phone, thanks to Cisco’s Analog Telephone Adapter, a box that takes a phone cable in the front and ethernet in the back and does pretty much exactly what you would expect a box that takes phone cable in the front and ethernet in the back would do.

3 responses to “VOIP arriving”

Rich Tong

3 September 2003

I must confess, I don’t know much about this, but a few guesses. First, to answer your question, yes, you can get something called 802.11q which does quality of service hints. XP I believe supports this, don’t know about the Linksys router.
But, I suspect that it isn’t your internal network that is the problem, but your ISP. Does this happen when you directly connect to the Internet? I’d guess that what is happening is you are congesting there when you have data going upstream. On most home networks, there is lots of downstream bandwidth, but not much upstream. I’m pretty sure most ISPs, don’t know what to do with QOS tagging that comes from their customers.
If you want I can research for you.
On your internal network, there should be literally no traffic running.

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bern

2 September 2003

I’ve been a Vonage customer for a couple of months now and, for the most part, really like the service. It’s terrific for someone like me who makes lots of long distance calls.
One problem I’m having though has to do with the priority of packets. I’m running a couple of machines on my home office network, both using Windows XP Pro hooked up wirelessly to a Linksys 54G router. The data packets flowing over the network seem to take priority over the voice packets, which leads to periodic 5 second to 10 second cut outs. That is, I can’t hear the person on the other end of my call and they can’t hear me. How does one prioritize the packets so the voice packets take precedence?

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Scott

12 April 2003

I have been a vonage Customer for month’s now i love it they even have a forum dedicated to them
http://www.vonage-forum.com

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