Making VoIP Work with Limited Router Choices

n NYC, my VoIP life has been just hunky-dory, but at our country house in a small town of 3,000 people in upstate New York we've had problems. Our town is serviced by one of the last remaining independent phone companies. (As a matter of fact, when we first bought this house we had a party line, sharing our line with a number of neighbors.) Now we've got DSL service, so we've come a long way.

When we signed up for DSL with our local phone company, they offered us a choice of a plain DSL modem or one that included a built-in wireless router. Hmm, built-in wireless router, no extra charge? OK, sounds good.

We've spent a few weekends trying to get SunRocket's VoIP to work with our DSL service. VoIP, whether it's SunRocket or other, works better when the VoIP device is placed between the modem and the router. This configuration gives the VoIP device priority over other DSL demands so that voice quality is maximized. But the combo router/modem from Comtrend that the phone company provided for us doesn't allow this setup, so we couldn't configure the SunRocket VoIP device optimally.

Ultimately (I won't bore you with the tech support call log, but use your imagination) we found that both the Comtrend and the SunRocket devices are using the SIP protocol. (SIP is a protocol that searches for the device on the Internet.) By disabling the SIP in the Comtrend we got the two devices to stop fighting and allow us to use VoIP.

What have we learned? Our DSL VoIP installation was a bit more challenging than our cable modem installation in NYC, but the phone quality is excellent now that we're up and running. We also decided to keep the DSL analog line with one traditional analog phone attached to it—in part to be able to make 911 calls from our remote area and in part to let us call the remote sensor attached to our boiler that lets us monitor the house's temperature from afar. Our thinking was that leaving the analog phone offered protection in the event that the Internet would go down and we'd lose the ability to talk to our heating system over VoIP.

The bottom line? If you're in a location where you don't have much choice in your DSL modem and you want to install VoIP, you too might troubleshoot your SIP setting in the event of a problem.

http://tech.yahoo.com/blog/raskin/5466;_ylt=Al44NVZxNt8Do1aEGrUGEooSLpA5