Simple QoS for VOIP - Using Blueface with basic Netopia Router at RunningWithBulls.com

Simple QoS for VOIP - Using Blueface with basic Netopia Router

Published by bbt December 19th, 2005 in bernard, internet, irishblogs, runningwithbulls.com, tech, voip

Back in February this year, I posted a simple test of Blueface’s free test account.

10 months on and I have now subscribed for their Freedom Basic account. I have also bought Linksys PAP2 ATA for our DECT handset.

All is going perfectly. If I was able to remove 1) my Eircom phoneline, or 2) remove my phoneline rental (maybe with SMART Telecom) I would be winning fully here.

Even without either of these I have made a huge saving on my home phonebill.

The final thing to do is to get *some* QoS on the connection.

E-mailing Blueface is always a pleasure. Within a few hours of mailing them I had been put in touch with Alan Cowap, one of their techs.

He sends me the following mail, on how to configure, *very basic* QoS on the Netopia 3347NWG Router that comes by default with Eircom DSL:

Your priority rule below should be for UDP traffic.
The port range you have specified is the same as the default RTP port range for the PAP2. (Which were Port (min): 16384 / Port (max): 16482)
You could also add an entry for UDP port 5060 - to prioritise SIP traffic.

I’m not familiar with which particular router you’re using but I assume the same settings can be used for ‘both’ direction ruleset.
However, you have no control over which data is sent priority to you from your ISPs server - which is the usual bottleneck for traffic on your network.

There are analytical ways to test the QoS is being applied.
The simplest is to place a call to the blueface echo test number - 301
- do this with no traffic on your network
- do it with your upstream fully loaded (e.g. sending a big email to yourself)
- do it with your downstream fully loaded (e.g. downloading the big email)
- do it with your upstream & downstream fully loaded (e.g.sending a big email to yourself, downloading a large file)
Repeat all of the above with QoS on and the off - then compare.

Regards,
Al

All fairly straight forward tests to do, but very helpful to get them first hand!

Hopefully that might help some one out!