June 12, 2005
Sucking On A New Pipe
If you recall, I was having some quality issues with Vonage. Things seemed to get better — or maybe they really didn’t. We don’t use our home phone that often so its hard to get a good sample set. But the other day I heard Kim repeating things and people telling her that they couldn’t understand. Enough is enough.
Now, Vonage is getting to 1 million customers. Most of which are happy so I assume this is my problem. Last time it was my ISP, Mesa Networks. I still think its the ISP. The system they use transits my Internet connection wirelessly from my house to a building a couple of miles away. Its a line of sight thing using radio signals. Now the bad part is that there seems to be some interesting way that the packets are broken up which messes with the audio. I heard some rumors of this surfing around but now I believe it. I don’t have any other neighbors nearby that have Vonage so I can’t prove the theory.
So as a test, I signed up for Qwest Premium DSL. I couldn’t get DSL when we moved here in 2001 because we were too far away. But about a year ago, they brought service out to us. Supposedly that gives you 7 mb/s down and 1 mb/s up but I am seeing more like 3 mb/s down and 500 kb/s down. My old line used to be about 1.5 mb/s up and 800 mb/s down, so its a toss up. Possibly more download speed but less upload speed. But if the upload is more consistent and doesn’t mess up Vonage, then it will be better overall.
I hooked everything up today. I took the ActionTec DSL router that comes with the Qwest service and connected to the phone line. Then I took my Vonage Linksys router and connected that to the Ethernet port on the DSL router. To get Vonage to work, I setup the Linksys router to have a static IP 192.168.0.2 and then I set that IP as the DMZ host in the ActionTec router. This allows for the Linksys to handle all the ports for the ActionTec router — kinda like it did before.
Going to test for a few days and see how it goes. If it works, I am canceling my Mesa Networks account and sticking with this. If it doesn’t help, I am stuck.
