Vonage/Motorola VT2442 QoS problems...

I have my house phone through Vonage to a Virgin 2Mb cable connection.
Generally it's very good, but sometimes, mainly when I have a torrent
downloading, the phone calls break up badly.

The cable modem is a Virgin-supplied Motorola SB5100i (on an ex-Telewest
network, if it makes a difference). Vonage supplied a VT2442 Wan/VoIP/4
port router when I joined them. You'd think the two Motorola boxes would
play nicely.

I know it could be just plain old overloading, but I've seen it happen
even when a torrent is only running at 1-2KB/s and there is nobody else
uploading from me. The network is otherwise quiet, and the activity
lights bear that out.

The phone gets better instantly if I kill the torrent.

Any ideas how to improve things? (Apart from scheduling torrents to only
run from 2am-7am, which is the current neighbour-friendly solution).

It seems like QoS *should* mean that the VoIP calls get a big enough lump
of the bandwidth anyway. Or am I missing something?

PCPaul wrote:
> I have my house phone through Vonage to a Virgin 2Mb cable connection.
> Generally it's very good, but sometimes, mainly when I have a torrent
> downloading, the phone calls break up badly.
>
> The cable modem is a Virgin-supplied Motorola SB5100i (on an ex-Telewest
> network, if it makes a difference). Vonage supplied a VT2442 Wan/VoIP/4
> port router when I joined them. You'd think the two Motorola boxes would
> play nicely.
>
> I know it could be just plain old overloading, but I've seen it happen
> even when a torrent is only running at 1-2KB/s and there is nobody else
> uploading from me. The network is otherwise quiet, and the activity
> lights bear that out.
>
> The phone gets better instantly if I kill the torrent.
>
> Any ideas how to improve things? (Apart from scheduling torrents to only
> run from 2am-7am, which is the current neighbour-friendly solution).
>
> It seems like QoS *should* mean that the VoIP calls get a big enough lump
> of the bandwidth anyway. Or am I missing something?
>
Torrenting opens quite a lot of connections, both in and out.
Be sure that the router Vonage supplied is properly set to prioritize
VoIP traffic (port 5060 UDP for SIP signalling and some high range UDP
ports for RTP traffic - the real "voice" traffic. Sorry I can't help you
with a proper port range, every device is set with its own, there is no
standard for it).
Be sure not to let your P2P client open too many connections, because
the router computational power may be insufficient to timely deliver the
packets if the connections are too many.
Reduce the number of peers and connections until your voice is not
breaking up.
QOS doesn't reserve bandwidth, but handles how quick a packet should be
forwarded.
If your router computational power is constantly running at 100%
capacity, there is no room for QOS-prioritized packets.
On top of that, an x-TW 2Mb BB is (AFAIK) 256 Kb up, and if you max out
the uplink channel, your downlink stops completely. That's the way cable
broadband [don't] work.
You loose half of your downlink speed when you push out a quarter of
your uplink speed.
It's a very fine balance that you can achieve only by trial and error,
tweaking you P2P client parameters to limit both the number of
connections (in & out) and the upload speed / available bandwidth.
Remember that VirginMedia Cable BB connections are under STM from 4pm to
midnight, if you exceed your download (and in the future upload) daily
allowance in that timeframe, you're "throttled" down to a lower service
level.
The wise move IMPOV is to postpone torrent downloading through the night.
Happy tweaking.

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