How do you get around the voice quality degradation that bittorrent causes Vonage?

March 3, 2004 7:31 AM

Anybody here use both Vonage and a bit torrent client? Any ideas on how to get around the incredible voice quality degredation that BT apparently causes?

I actually found what looks like a solution here, I just don't know enough about routers to be able to implement it. What is QoS? Does the Vonage-supplied router (netgear RP114) have it? How do I assign a port to Vonage and give it high priority?

posted by stupidsexyFlanders to computers & internet (7 comments total)

I'm surprised there isn't a bittorrent client that lets you throttle it's download speed (what you really want to do), have you checked?

Failing that, you could use netlimiter to control the download/upload speed of any particular application.
posted by malphigian at 7:42 AM on March 3, 2004

Try Shadow's Experimental Bit Torrent Client. It's got a throttle and I've never had a problem with it.
posted by toothless joe at 8:03 AM on March 3, 2004

I plugged my linksys router INTO my voice box. Now it seems that when I use the phone it grabs the bandwidth it needs from what my computers are using, no problem. When I had the phone box plugged into the router it would have to compete for the bandwidth.
posted by n9 at 9:37 AM on March 3, 2004

Cool. I have problems with Bit Torrent at home. I think it sucks up so much bandwidth the cable modem can no longer tell it's online and shuts down. Most mornings I have to go reset the modem. I've been considering moving to this router because there's an open-source firmware (not from Linksys, obviously) that allows you to do QoS, traffic shaping, etc.
posted by yerfatma at 9:54 AM on March 3, 2004

There are many BitTorrent clients that let you throttle. My personal favorite client is BitSpirit.
posted by waxpancake at 10:41 AM on March 3, 2004

QoS stands for "quality of service" - trying to guarantee certain minimal levels of various parameters (in your case you need a certain minimum bandwidth and maximum latency, for voice, i would guess).
posted by andrew cooke at 4:27 PM on March 3, 2004

TorrentStorm is very good, too, and you can set limits globally or per file.
posted by signal at 6:55 AM on March 4, 2004