[kwlug disc.] acanac or other phone service

[Jason Locklin]

>> I have had acanac for dryloop DSL and VOIP service for about 6 months.
>> It's dirt cheap (<$40 a month for both including everything), and
>> they provide excellent customer service. I bought my own SIP router
>> so that I didn't have to pay the rental fee, and it does QOS network
>> management. QOS is vital if you do any heavy downloading or uploading
>> on your internet connection. Call quality is pristine and reliable
>> (Though, I do have a good DSL connection, and it took a bit of tweaking
>> on my router).
>
>Which SIP router is this?  I'd be interested in doing something like
>this in the future so it would be good to know where to start with a
>QOS-capable router.  What sort of tweaking did you have to do on the
>router?
>
>Denver

Originally, I was using a DVG-1120M, but because of the lack of QOS,
and it's limited features, I bought a Linksis SPA-2102 (Still have the
old one if anyone wants it cheap). The SPA is a nice little box. It
allows for two lines with two different providers, can act as a router
(although it only has two RJ-45s -so you need a hub or something for
multiple computers). I currently have it connected between my
modem/router, and a wireless router acting as a hub/wireless access
point. So the SPA is just in "network gateway" mode, and is not
actually doing the routing for my network. Regardless, it manages QOS
nicely as everything from the computers have to pass through it.
Regardless of what I'm doing with the computers, I can't seem to
degrade the phone quality (>10 torrents running, X over SSH to my
workstation at work, doesn't matter).

To get the best quality, I had to play with a few settings. First, I
disabled the "silence suppression" -It just plain doesn't work well
and cuts off the beginning of everything you say. I ended up setting
the "network jitter buffer" to "extremely high." That eliminated some
quality issues, and even at that setting, the delay is not noticeable,
and considerably better than when I was using Ekiga. Trial and error
led me to set the RTP packet size to 0.020. Occasionally I still hear
an echo in the first 10 seconds of a call, but after that, it sounds
great.

-- 
Regards,

Jason Locklin.
University of Waterloo
http://science.uwaterloo.ca/~jalockli