We had an odd outage recently. It started last night, and continued through today. I had figured it was just another random network outage granted us by our benevolent cable company. I figured they were aware of it and working on it. But as it stretched on toward 24 hours, I thought I should at least call and check on it with them. I was surprised and worried when they said “No, no known problems in that area.” and “Yeah, I can ping your cable modem just fine.” So, I started looking into it on my end — something I probably should have done to start with. It’s just a good general rule that it’s not my stuff that’s broken. Only this time, the rule failed. I still don’t quite know what was up. Either the linksys WAP switch/router was messed, or the vonage voip box was messed. What was odd was that I could get to the web interface of both of the and they both reported fine. But there was a red light on the “WAN” connection on the linksys. I’d been wanting to rearrange the network anyway, so I moved the voip box from between the cable modem and the linksys to hanging off the linksys as a peer of the other items in my network. We’ll see if it degrades phone quality much.
Generally, we’re happy with vonage. It’s pretty economical. And we like not having to worry about whether we’re calling someone down the block, the other end of the state or wherever my mom happens to be at any given time. But voice quality is still sub-par. I wonder if it’s because I’m connected over a cable modem instead of DSL. Maybe it’s not just my computer usage that interferes with my voice call, but anyone else on my cable loop. I wonder if the new house is DSL-friendly. There seems to be a decent wireless provider in the area, but it’s also tres cher.
Anyway, if you can read this, we’re back up. 🙂
For those that care, here’s the configuration change.
Original configuration:
Current configuration: