Ooma Telo box Qos doesn't seem to work

[ralphl]

Three days ago I bought an Ooma Telo box in order to make telephone calls over the Internet. It is something like Magic Jack, but had better reviews. However, I can't make the Qos feature work and neither can Ooma Support. Is anybody out there an Ooma guru that can help me?

My internet service setup consists of: /Internet>Westell DSL Modem-Router>Ooma>Linksys Router/. Note the two routers--the only thing connected to the Westell is the Ooma box. I don't have any computers connected to Westell and its wifi is unused. The only reason it is there is for its dsl modem. All computers connect to the linksys router and all computer traffic passes through the Ooma. This allows Ooma to do Qos control on the computer traffic holding up outgoing traffic to let voice signals go first. This is how Ooma recommends their box be connected in. However, the Qos (holding up outgoing computer traffic in favor of voice) doesn't seem to work.

If I make a telephone call through Ooma everything connects fine and I get good voice quality. However, as soon as I start up some outgoing computer traffic the remote phone (not the phone plugged into the Ooma box), voice begins to break up. It seems obvious to me that the Ooma Qos feature to restrict outgoing computer traffic in favor of voice is not working. As I said Ooma Support was no help. They told me to change the Advance Settings>Upstream Internet Speed to several different settings, but none of the settings had any effect. It was as though Qos was disabled someplace.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[stevech]

I tried 4 VoIP providers, none were Ooma.
All 4 were unacceptable. Bad audio, call attempts failed according to area code. Too many outages.
My wife accurately defined all of these as "toy" phones.

VoicePulse was the best of the lot, but they had a days long outage of their hosting provider's services. At its best, VoicePulse wasn't good enough.

So to dump AT&T, which was the goal, eagerly sought, we would up with TimeWarner's digital phone add on to our cable bundle. Not as cheap. But it works well. Meets WAF.

 

[coxhaus]

I switched from AT&T to Time Warner for cable and phone. The Time Warner phone works great and I can call anywhere is the US for free.

 

[ralphl]

I got Ooma to work by using the QoS feature of the Westell modem/router box rather than the QoS of the Ooma box, which is apparently broken.

1 While the Ooma box worked fine when there was no outgoing load on Internet router, voice at the non-Ooma end broke up, whenever there was a significant load by a computer on the uplink.
1.1 To provide a load, while I was talking on Ooma, I ran an Internet speed test that did both a download test and an upload test—usually speakeasy.net, because it runs fastest. Because the download speed was quite fast (5 to 10 mbps), Ooma had no problem while the download was being done. However, the upload speed was only .76mbps, and this caused the voice breakup problem.
2 I first configured the system to be “Internet dsl>Westell modem/router>Ooma>Linksys router”. In this configuration the only thing attached to the Westell ethernet ports was Ooma. The wifi wasn't used. All wifi and other computer traffic went through the secondary Linksys router. The only purpose of the Westell in this configuration was to provide a dsl modem. This is the recommended Ooma configuration, since it allows Ooma to block upstream traffic from the computers to the Internet. This is supposed to allow voip to have priority. However, it didn't work. Neither I nor Ooma support could make this Ooma Qos feature work. I presume it is broken. No setting in the Ooma Qos field had any effect.
3 I then changed the configuration to be “Internet>Westell modem/router>Ooma”. In this setup computer traffic used the ethernet and wifi features of the Westell to access the Internet. To give the Ooma voice priority over the computer traffic I setup a new Qos rule in the Westell. Obviously I didn't need the secondary Linksys router in this configuration.
3.1 I connected to the Westell by using Firefox directed to IP address 10.0.0.1.
3.2 I selected “Advanced” and under Advanced selected WAN>QoS.
3.3 I checked “Enable QoS services” box.
3.4 I checked “Enable QoS Filter Rules” box. There were no filters set.
3.5 I clicked “New Filter”, or something like that. It brought up a QoS Filters window.
3.6 I put the Ooma Mac Address (00:18:61:10:ca:df) in the SrcMacAddr box and made sure the comparator was set to EQ.
3.7 I skipped everything else down to the bottom of the page and set Class of Service to AF2. I just picked this out o f the blue as having a priority value higher than BE (best effort). Since I have only two priorities I don't think it mattered which high priority value I used.
3.8 I clicked “save filter” and waited until the window restored itself.
3.9 I then went back to Advanced>WAN>QoS and made sure that the boxes Enable QoS Services and Enable QoS Filter Rules were checked (they seemed to sometimes get unchecked), clicked Apply and waited about 10 seconds for the action to be completed.
3.10 I dialed up a number with the Ooma phone and had the person on the other end listen for voice breakup while I ran the computer to Internet speed test several times.
3.11 There were no voice breakups. I think I am going to like Ooma, at least in this house. Now I have to go home and get another Ooma box working there.

 

[stevech]

Time will tell.

And concurrent heavy uploading from PC, vs. VoIP.

Cable TV digital phone is better because it has true priority in the MAC layer, inside a dual-use phone/internet cable modem, but more so, the cable companies don't route over lousy generic IP services - they are big enough to have their own gigabit backbone connections.

 

[moosport]

When I first installed Ooma either before or after the router, I had issues with internet traffic when on the phone. Updating the latest firmware on E4200 fixes the QoS. Now with Ooma behind the router, both traffic works without issue.

As for Time Warner phone, I believe it does not share the same line. thus the quality is better.

 

[stevech]

Time Warner, Cox, etc. digital phone on cable TV.
I'm told that the phone's traffic is inserted in the MAC layer, same modem as PC/router, but does not use IP based QoS. So it's not actually VoIP.
My experience: Wireline equivalence.

The main problem I had with 4 VoIP providers was that they never had their call routing reliable - routing to different area code via ever-changing long haul carriers. The little VoIP companies don't have enough clout.

 

[paulsiu]

I finally got my mom's OOMA to work

I had set my mom up with a OOMA through Comcast economy internet, the service provided about 3 Mps download with roughly 0.9 mps upload. The router was setup to be between the cable modem and the router. This is what OOMA recommended.

I ran a speedtest and it verified that the upload was about 900 kps. I enter the 80% of the download and upload value into OOMA's qos page because I thought that was what OOMA wanted. This did not work. Voice quality was great, until my mom started using the internet. The other person she was talking to started getting gargling noise. I believe I enter a value of 512Kps, thinking that I should go lower instead of higher.

It turns out that OOMA does qos by basically allocating 80% of the value you entered, so I should have just entered 3 mps/0.9 mps. After I did that, OOMA worked perfectly even if she's accessing the internet.

Paul

 

[stevech]

You are discovering why Cable TV digital phone is wireline quality and VoIP over the same IP path as PCs isn't.