Vonage with Road Runner »
I recently (as in yesterday) upgraded from residential Road Runner to Road Runner "Business Class". Thus far, it seems that I'm paying something more than twice the rate in exchange for a static IP address and perhaps two-thirds of the bandwidth while downloading (uploading seems to be about the same). That just doesn't seem right.
Nonetheless, it gave me headache upon headache because I was having a very difficult time getting Vonage to work. That is to say, when I simply plugged my Vonage router into the new modem (which is allegedly required for the static IP address), it wouldn't work. Rather, it wouldn't work with any sort of speed. My downloading bandwidth dropped to where it was generally quite a bit below 1 mbps. I had around 5 mbps with the residential service.
Finally I figured out that by placing a simple router between the Vonage router and the new modem, it worked. True, I only receive 3 mbps while downloading, but that's actually the rate advertised, so I really can't complain. So because of this, I can only assume that the RT31P2 (the Vonage router) doesn't like having a static IP address. When it picks it up dynamically, from either my residential modem or from the router, it works like a champ. Go figure.
On a related note: The Vonage VoIP Speed Test is pretty cool. It's not much different from any of those other tests - but the display is much nicer. And it rarely seems to be busy, like so many other servers are when you try to run the test.
And for a final tip, if you reset the Linksys WAP11 to factory settings, the default IP address - it is static - is 192.168.1.251. Go figure. I guess they figured that wouldn't conflict with any other devices on the good old default 192.168.1 subnet or something. For me, it was a royal pain to get to until I found that little gem of information.
