Configuring Vonage
erich March 1st, 2006
After speaking with friends and colleagues, I recently was convinced that Vonage was a stable enough product to switch phone service to. For those of you who don’t know what Vonage is, it’s a complete phone service provider, over the internet instead of traditional phone lines. This technology is known as VoIP, which stands for Voice Over Internet Protocol, and Vonage charges half of what more of the traditional phone carriers are charging.
About five days after signing up for the service, I received my Vonage router in the mail, which is basically a Linksys router branded by Vonage (cable or DSL broadband access is required by Vonage). The router itself has four LAN ports, two phone ports, and a dedicated port for connecting to the cable modem.
The router comes pre-configured with a standard class C IP address of 192.168.15.1. Vonage expects that in most cases, the user will simply connect the router to the cable modem and all will be well. However, I am running a wireless 802.11G router with SRX400 technology, and when I connected the two routers together via crossover cable, I was unable to ping either device, and could not get on the internet.
I quickly decided to change the IP address on the Vonage router to be 192.168.1.4, keeping my wireless router at 192.168.1.3. This failed to change the level of connectivity. The documentation made mention of configuring static routes on the Vonage router in the case of multi-router configurations. However, I had no success with this either.
After fooling around with the settings for about two weeks off and on, I finally broke down and called the Vonage tech support, and ended up speaking with Samesh in Bangalore, India. After learning my tiny network topography, Samesh instructed me to change the IP address on my Vonage router to be 192.168.2.3. She then told me to go to the MAC Address Clone tab in the router configuration utility, and clone the MAC address of the router.
Once the router rebooted, I was instantly connected. Because of my pedestrian understanding of networking principles, I don’t understand why that specific IP address works and is able to connect. I also don’t understand why I cannot ping the Vonage router or otherwise connect to it while connected to my wireless network. If anyone can provide a concise explanation of the reason for this, I would love to post your comments as a follow up.
tags: bangalore, voip, vonage, class+c+network, networking, tech+support, wireless
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- Comments(2)
[…] In my previous post, I made some changes to IP addresses on my routers to get everything connected. However, something was not quite right - when talking on the phone, the sound would fade in and out, and was basically unusable. I also noticed that I could only get DHCP addresses on one of my routers, and only if I was directly connected to it. Clearly, this was no good. […]
It’s because the A+ graph routing IP isn’t in sync with the PIEHOLE…If the PIEHOLE isn’t willing to open up then you can’t use your ping to connect.