Comments on: QOS for SOHO VOIP Solved, Tomato Firmware

By: Kevin J Lambert

Kevin J Lambert — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:44:03 +0000

So many QoS implementations use bandwidth caps. This is unintuitive and sacrificial. Can’t we just have a basic prioritization without limiting bandwidth of other services during off-peak periods? For instance, during a phone call I don’t care if all other traffic grinds to a halt. In the same sense I’m perfectly OK with BitTorrent saturating my network while I’m not at home.

By: Bill

Bill — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:24:16 +0000

I could not get my Tomato to work successfully. Then I found a QOS tutorial which clearly explained how to get the best out of it. I was able to discover why my setup didn’t work and make adjustments.

Here is the link http://www.linksysinfo.org/forums/showthread.php?t=60304

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:50:16 +0000

I have a Vonage box that I moved from outside my WRT54GL/Tomato router to inside because I found the Vonage box was blocking ports. Moving it inside caused the voice quality to drop significantly. Just adding the port forwarding seems to have helped significantly, but the QOS modifications really knocked my socks off. Thanks for this write-up. It was exactly what I was looking for.

By: Setting up an OpenVPN tunnel using a CentOS-based system as the server and a router flashed with Tomato firmware as the client – Part 4 « Michigan Telephone, VoIP and Broadband blog

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:29:48 +0000

[...] QOS for SOHO VOIP Solved, Tomato Firmware [...]

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 21:11:54 +0000

I set a few QoS rules on the my router running Tomato, but noticed I was still getting unclassfied traffic through, I was wondering how that would be possible as I was pretty sure I had covered everything…(I wanted to be able to limit my flatmates connections as he really doesn’t respect any kind of torrenting limitations leading to our bandwidth getting limited by our ISP, and the network slowing a little, although nowhere near as badly on Tomato firmware compared to Linksys stock firmware.)

The problem being, some traffic still isn’t getting classfied, I even deleted all the rules and set just one up so that no IP, protocol, port, or other filter was selected, and whilst the majority of the traffic then fell under this category, some did not. (And it wasn’t just the traffic from my PC to the router HTTP gui, which I could understand not getting classfied) but traffic from me and my flatmate to the internet

Has anyone got any ideas as to why that may happen?

By: Matt

Matt — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:13:12 +0000

Very good point NoDadddy. Many ATA’s and Softphones RTP ranges can be configured. Unfortunately I am using a Linksys SPA 942 and have been unable to dial in the range. I don’t P2P much and don’t have any other traffic traveling over these ports, so I haven’t ran into any troubles yet.

I added to the post to try 16384 – 16482 UDP before going going all out and classifying so many ports. Thanks for the feedback.

By: NoDaddy.com

NoDaddy.com — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 10:58:32 +0000

10,000 ports? are you high?

stop that baseline nonsense and adjust your RTP port range on your ATA to something other than inane

I use 16384 – 16482

If you must P2P then you must also use a client that allows you to specify port ranges.

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:05:51 +0000

@jim – You aren’t inherently loosing anything by using Tomato. I have actually seen (seat-of-the-pants) performance improvements over other firmwares.

A: QOS does not rob bits, it throttles/routes them. If you lost bits, you would being losing part of your data stream and it would likely corrupt the output. If you mean rob bandwidth/throughput; there is the potential of loosing some “burst” speeds due to the fixed nature of Tomato’s QOS implementation. For me it was give an take… give a little bit of bandwidth for an uninterrupted phone conversation.

By: jim

jim — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:03:00 +0000

What am I loosing by using Tomato?

I have DSL and every bit counts.

Q: Does QoS rob bits? and how much?

Thanks
jim

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:56:04 +0000

@Dimitrios - I have found when setting up Tomato classifications, simple is almost always better. If you don't need granular filters, don't set them. For some reason they don't always work as expected. QOS seems to be more of an art than a science. All you can really do is use the real-time monitors until you find that magic combination that works for your traffic. Port 5060 is for SIP traffic, don't forget the RTP ports. You may have success using just the L7. How is the quality for your voice calls? Can you run all four at the same time? I would run a trace route on your server in California and see where your latency is. You will likely find it is with your ISP and for the most part out of your control, but you might get lucky. Another neat way to check global latency is with just-ping.com (you must have IMCP enabled). If this isn't the issue, it definitely a bandwidth issue. If your CRM has heavy graphics you could try local caching or any number of proxy servers/internet accelerators. Another thing to check is your bandwidth utilization overall. If you are not running pedal to metal QOS isn't going to help much. It doesn't really speed things up, it is more for bandwidth allocation. On the other-hand, if you are constantly maxed out, prioritizing your traffic will help... but you might ultimately need to consider upgrading your connection. Anyone else have some advise?

By: Dimitrios

Dimitrios — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:02:47 +0000

Matt…thanks for the reply!!

One thing that I am confused about: We run the VOIP with Softphones, so prioritizing the MAC addresses doesn’t really help since we have no Adapters. I assume that if we prioritize port 5060, that is for the VOIP? And I would do the L7 when setting up that port? Or do I skip the L7 in this case and just set up port 5060?

As you can tell I am not an IT guy, just know enough to get myself in trouble running my mortgage company!!

Also my CRM is on a server I own in California and I am in Ohio. It has been slow recently, the guys who manage my server (they made the CRM), say that it can be any connection from here to there making it slow…that being said, would it help to set up the IP address of my CRM server anyway?

THANKS!!!

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:50:27 +0000

@Dimitrios – It’s actually L7, it is an application layer packet classifier. Basically it’s a filter that can determine what application the data/traffic is coming from based on certain identifiers in the packets. They can be helpful when you don’t know or want to specify a specific port or IP address.

For your office setup; I would always set priority for your VOIP traffic. If you experience latency with the CRM site you can try to increase the priority on port 80/443 just for the CRM’s destination IP. You can also set the default priority to lowest to ensure the specified business traffic runs smooth.

Let me know if you are having any specific problems and I’ll do my best to help you out.

By: Dimitrios

Dimitrios — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:45:17 +0000

What is the I7-filter? What does it do?

I have a small office, 4 computers, all have softphones. I want to prioritize the VOIP traffic. We do not have any heavy downloads, no P2P or any of that stuff..our CRM is web based, so the 2 main things we use our internet for are calls and using the CRM.

Anyone have any tips for maximizing my set up?

Thanks!

By: SteveJ’s Blog » Blog Archive » Linksys WRT54GL

SteveJ’s Blog » Blog Archive » Linksys WRT54GL — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:51:42 +0000

[...] More info about how to set up QoS properly can be found here. [...]

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 03:45:53 +0000

@Scott – It really confused me too… The way I see it, the Rate represents the transfer speed and the Limit is the maximum speed/rate. The limit tells the QOS how much to base the percentages on. If the limit is set above the actual available bandwidth it changes the scale and won’t give you the guaranteed rates needed for VOIP.

By: Scott

Scott — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:35:07 +0000

What I’m trying to understand, and can’t find anywhere, is a description of what the Rate/Limit settings do… Limit is the high end and Rate is? How do they work together?

By: QOS for SOHO VOIP Solved, Tomato Firmware » Matt Walker « PCH’s Stuff

QOS for SOHO VOIP Solved, Tomato Firmware » Matt Walker « PCH’s Stuff — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 06:04:05 +0000

[...] February 10, 2008 in Internet, Security QOS for SOHO VOIP Solved, Tomato Firmware » Matt Walker [...]

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:18:44 +0000

I am using tomato with verizon FIOS and Vonage with great success. I have also found that using the I7-filters work great.

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 15:54:09 +0000

A couple of well noted corrections/aditions to the post thanks to the Tomato Firmware Forum at linksysinfo.org:

- WRTG54 = WRT54G - What was I thinking?
- the firmware is written by Jonathan Zarate (polar cloud is the host, thanks Johnathan!)
- If you have any other traffic (P2P) on ports 10000-20000, you should try the SIP l7-Filter.
- Another solution is to setup a QOS classification for the IP/Mac addresss of your standalone VoIP phones or adapters if they are connecting to a trunk over the internet

Thanks guys!