Ooma at Woot today only

[calmloki]

Unplugged our Ooma hub from La Quinta on Monday and plugged it in up here in Oregon this evening. It worked right off the bat. I do notice that we have it running off a line from our router rather than going through the Ooma first, then to the router. AIR that was to make the fax line work - regardless, working is working and the Ooma is great for us.

Oh - when the internet is down or we have the Ooma unplugged we have it set to ring one of the cell phones - as far as a caller is concerned we just sit by the phone waiting for their call. Sick.

[MasterBlaster]

Quote:

Originally Posted by calmloki Unplugged our Ooma hub from La Quinta on Monday and plugged it in up here in Oregon this evening. It worked right off the bat. I do notice that we have it running off a line from our router rather than going through the Ooma first, then to the router. AIR that was to make the fax line work - regardless, working is working and the Ooma is great for us. Oh - when the internet is down or we have the Ooma unplugged we have it set to ring one of the cell phones - as far as a caller is concerned we just sit by the phone waiting for their call. Sick.

When you configure your Ooma (or any VOIP device) that way you risk intermittant dropouts and skipping while the router passes data to/from other devices. When that happens your ooma calls may be quite a bit less than satisfactory.

I suspect that your Ooma has yet to be stress tested.

[Rustward]

Quote:

Originally Posted by MasterBlaster When you configure your Ooma (or any VOIP device) that way you risk intermittant dropouts and skipping while the router passes data to/from other devices. When that happens your ooma calls may be quite a bit less than satisfactory. I suspect that your Ooma has yet to be stress tested.

No. Absolutely not.

If your router has good QoS capabilities and is properly configured, the important traffic will get through and the unimportant traffic will get queued or dropped.

Educate yourself.

Here: Quality of service - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And here: Quality of Service (QoS) - Cisco Systems

My Ooma is behind the router and calls are completely unaffected by any other traffic -- six simultaneous speed tests (which saturate the network), video, etc.

But it took me earning 28 semester hours at the CC with the high schoolers and countless hours in the Cisco lab to understand this stuff.

[MasterBlaster]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rustward No. Absolutely not. If your router has good QoS capabilities and is properly configured, the important traffic will get through and the unimportant traffic will get queued or dropped.

Yes I suppose it can be done as you post. For the average Joe though what you suggest may be difficult to acheive.

good QoS capabilities may cost you some dollars though.

[Rustward]

My router came with the Verizon Fios service, so this is what the average Joe gets. I posted earlier, this router has a lot of capabilities that only a pro will know how to use. QoS was not configured and I had to do that. If I had not taken the CCNA/CCNP classes I would have not even known what QoS is, let alone how to use it. I suspect that as we go forward, more routers will be pre-configured to solve common problems. Just a few years ago, you couldn't even buy a consumer-grade router with any QoS capabilities. Kinda like you rarely see a mobile phone that is not also a clock, camera, calculator, web browser, you name it, any more.

Your previous post seemed to be on the assumption that the network (router) cannot differentiate video, or file sharing, of whatever from voice. I can understand that.

When you connect to a server and send data to it, your application uses a "well known port" or a registered port. Well known ports are standardized by application. The network (including all routers and switches) can look at the source or destination port number and determine (in most cases) whether the traffic is, for example, web browsing, email, video, file sharing, or Doom, ftp, or VOIP, or whatever. This is how the network knows, on a packet-by-packet basis what kind of traffic it is handling. QoS does not work on port numbers alone. This is just an example. There are lots of different protocols in QoS.

I do not talk out of my . . .

List of TCP and UDP port numbers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers

This is probably not very interesting to most in this forum.

[MasterBlaster]

Rustward:

Again, I am not doubting what you say is true. It just takes some detailed knowhow that many a Joe just doesn't have.

By the way, for fun I looked at the Ooma website. All of their configuration diagrams that I looked at had the Ooma device before the router. They know more than anyone about the (potential) problems doing what you suggest incorrectly.

Evidently the Ooma device is itself a Hub and has it's own firewall and QoS capability. When the router's firewall/software/configuration doesn't talk nicely with the Ooma Hub/firewall/configuration then problems occur. I read that having really high bandwidth and really high performance routers help but not everyone has or wants to pay for all that. Also I read that there are a variety of firmware configurations of Ooma some of which have issues with a router.

Still, A smart guy like you I'm sure could make it work.

[Rustward]

Quote:

Originally Posted by MasterBlaster Rustward: Again, I am not doubting what you say is true. It just takes some detailed knowhow that many a Joe just doesn't have. By the way, for fun I looked at the Ooma website. All of their configuration diagrams that I looked at had the Ooma device before the router. They know more than anyone about the (potential) problems doing what you suggest incorrectly.

Yes, you are correct, they do, or so it seems.

Before I upgraded from DSL to fiber, I got worse performance with the Ooma in front of the router than I did behind the router. I didn't spend much time on it, but I believe it had something to do with the DNS servers that Ooma was using. With the Ooma before the router, the Ooma was using their own DNS servers, not the ones that Verizon assigned in the DHCP process. Go figure.

If you subscribe to Fios, at least here in Texas, you do not have the option to install the Ooma before the router. Fios is delivered on a RG-6 coaxial cable for which the Ooma does not have a port. The router is also a bridge between your LAN and the Verizon network. They bridge through the same cable that serves your cable TV -- yes, they do. We have Time-Warner cable and both the Fios internet and Time-Warner's signal are on the exact same cable. So the bridge has to be "smart" enough to pick out the Fios signal and ignore Time-Warner's signal, something that would be beyond the scope of a third party like Ooma. I suppose there is some kind of inter-company agreement on which frequencies each will use. Shoot, for all I know, this might be regulated.