Best settings for VOIP?

[tom2u]

I've got QoS settings both in my DSL modem (Actiontec GT701D) and Router (SMC Barricade 7004VBR) that I hope can improve my VOIP performance. Which should I use? Which device should control the QoS settings? Both? Is there a better way of ensuring I have enough bandwith for good quality voice calls? My DSL connection is mediocre (30ms ping, 3mb down and .2mb up) so I need all the help I can get.

 

[john-b691]

You can play with them and see if you get any benefit. If they just do the high,medium,low stuff then it helps a little but almost nothing helps if you are running streaming video or bit torrent.

The only one you can actually do something about is the outbound traffic but your router must support actual bandwidth limits not the "high,medium,low" stuff. What you do it set all traffic that is not voice traffic to be limited to say .15m/sec. This leaves .05m for the voice. It depends exactly which encoding the voice uses many are 30k protocols + overhead but other are 64k.

The problem with this method is that you reserve the bandwidth even when you are not using voice. You would need a very advanced router to do it on the fly.

On top of that you cannot do much about the incoming traffic. You can only drop traffic AFTER you receive it. That means if the downstream side is full the ISP may drop your voice packets before you get it. The QoS settings try to cause errors on the other traffic so they slow down and in theory leave enough bandwidth for the voice but it doesn't work well for bittorrent things.

Really QoS is only truly beneficial when you completely control the network as in a corporate environment or maybe the lan in the house.

 

[wacabletech]

I've got QoS settings both in my DSL modem (Actiontec GT701D) and Router (SMC Barricade 7004VBR) that I hope can improve my VOIP performance. Which should I use? Which device should control the QoS settings? Both? Is there a better way of ensuring I have enough bandwith for good quality voice calls? My DSL connection is mediocre (30ms ping, 3mb down and .2mb up) so I need all the help I can get.

You have 2 routers, so the answer would be hook the VOIP up to the actiontec and then set QOS on that.

For a home network I feel its a waste of time voip bandwidth requirements are ridiculously low, in fact if not for the latency you could run it over a 3G cell phone connection and still download apps. Your ISP is not giving you QOS so your only covering the LAN side and if your overloading that, you got issues.

Not to mention over half the time the headers are larger than the data on VOIP by the time it prioritizes it [assuming it will do that to such small data packets to begin with] it's already out the door.

 

[tom2u]

Is there a way of setting up some sort of shortcut that could trigger the bandwith allocation to the VOIP port when I'm about to answer a call or make a call?

And thank you for the informative suggestions. I'm reading about the points you made and can't comment yet on them due to a lack of knowledge on my part.