Submission + - Can any router guarantee bandwidth for VOIP? 2
cartman94501 writes: My wife and I use Vonage for Voice over IP at home, mainly for work-related phone calls so we don't have to give out our home number to clients and colleagues. Most of the time it works fine, but when I'm using BitTorrent or other high-bandwidth applications (purely for legal and non-copyright-violating purposes, of course), the call quality gets choppy. I have used my Linksys (not a WRT54G, so "upgrading" it to Linux probably won't work) router's QoS feature to assign high priority to the MAC address of the Vonage box, low priority to the BitTorrent box, and medium quality to everything else, which helps a little, but not enough.
Is there a router out there that would allow me to reserve, say, 75-90kbps of bandwidth off the top for VOIP and never, ever allow any application to use that, regardless of whether there's a VOIP call going on at the moment or not? That would solve my problem, but I fear I'd have to build a Linux box and learn all sorts of esoteric commands to really make that work.
Are any of you SlashDotters aware of a commercially-available router that would allow me to accomplish this goal with some sort of ease? While I'm not prepared to pay four figures, I'm certainly not naïve enough to expect such a device to be available in the $50-100 range of your garden-variety wireless router. Wireless would be ideal, but if I could patch it in between my existing wireless router and the cable modem, and turn off QoS entirely on the existing router, that would work, too.
I'd greatly appreciate any advice the community might have for me.
