Hi all,
I recently asked a question regarding QOS in uk.telecom and got no response, so thought here might be a better idea... I have a grandstream ATA486 set up in the recommended way, such that it is: Cable modem > ATA > Wireless router > PC's. My problem is that I am on a shared internet connection with other people in my house, and the QOS facilities that I was hoping for in placing the ATA in front of the router aren't what I'd thought. I live with some (irritating) bandwidth hogs, however they are here to stay so the option of getting them to stop downloading unfortunately doesn't exist.
When one of them starts downloading, although I can hear people OK, our upstream isn't so good and there is a big delay in what I say and it is constantly breaking up. As the ATA has all traffic from the router passed to it before going to the cable modem, I want it to literally strangle the bandwidth going to the router so it can reserve all the bandwidth it needs for my VOIP calls. I believe this can be done by adjusting the Layer 2 and layer 3 QOS settings, however do not know what these should be. I have tried changing the values for layer 3 QOS (diffserv/presidence value), and although it accepts the changes, doesnt seem to affect performance. If I change the layer 2 settings, the ATA will not get an IP from the cable modem so cannot connect for SIP services and none of the computers can access the net.
The manual says shocking nothing about these settings, and after emailing support at grandstream I got the reply: "Please try to swap the position of 486 and your wireless router by connecting the 486 behind your wireless router to see whether this improves a little bit. Or you may use our new f/w and set 486 into bridge mode." which doesn't make much sense to me, as the instructions say that having the ATA used as a client off the router gets rid of the QOS features it has. And the firmware which they say to use to set it to bridge mode is still a BETA version, so the box hasn't updated to it, and there are lots of reports on the net about it being troublesome. Plus what would bridge mode do, I thought bridging was linknig two networks together, whereas I almost want to cut out the second part of the network (the Pc's linked from the wireless router) when the phone is in use.
If anyone could help it would be much appreciated, or point me to the place where I can get help.
TIA