Paul's Time Sink

17 Aug, 2004

Our Vonage broadband phone adapter was delivered yesterday. The installation was pretty easy. I decided not not install it as the Vonage documentation instructed me. I plugged the adapter directly into my dsl modem, which has 4 ethernet ports. I have saveral static ip addresses, so I allocated one for it directly. I decided that I didn't want to plug my current firewall into the adapter itself because I wasn't sure about how well the modem adapter would route my non-phone traffic. Also, I didn't want to put the adapter in my internal network, becase if I had a lot of network traffic, it could interfere with the bandwidth for it.
Right now it is possible for some network traffic from my main network to cause the broadband phone to not have enough bandwidth. If I have a lot of web traffic, this could starve the broadband adapter. I am going to look into getting a router that has a QoS feature, where I can allocate 100Kbs of bandwidth to the broadband phone adapter.

The other thing that I need to do is to setup Call Forwarding from my old phone line to this new phone line. I am only doing this because SBC does not have local number portability for their landline. Once they get that, I will transfer the number, and then cancel the old line.