VoIP Central

If you are a VoIP user, chances are that you have often found your phone to be rendered useless due to exhaustion of upstream bandwidth of your internet connection. Now, that is likely to when you are in the process of transferring/uploading files and just in time you get a call.



This is so because typically your ISP gives you far less upstream bandwidth than your downstream bandwidth, which means downloading speed may be a blazing 8 mbps, but your uploading speed may be as low as 256 kbps.



So if you only have 256Kbps upload rate and running a file transfer, your file will take two minutes to complete but it will eat all of your available bandwidth, thus killing your call.



So will increasing your uploading bandwidth solve the problem?

Well, it will not solve the problem, but will merely shorten your phone downtime. For example, if you have 1 mbps upload bandwidth, it will take 30 secs for the file to be uploaded, but then your phone will be unusable for those 30 secs!



If only you could set your packet priority or what is known as Quality of Service (QoS), it would have remarkably solved the problem.



Benjamin J. Higginbotham in Technology Evangelist has discovered how to get rid of this situation and dramatically improve your VoIP service. The article has been most revealing indeed. Faced with a similar situation, he talks about the Hawking Technology HBB1 Broadband Booster and how it could help you out.



The current version of the Internet or Internet Protocol Version 4 (or IPv4) that we use is a pretty odd protocol that doesn’t allow you to set If only you could set your packet priority or QoS that will tell the Internet that voice packets are more important than file transfer packets, hence, upload the voice first and whatever is left over use for file transfer.



So how do you get QoS on your home bandwidth and tell your system that the voice packets are more important than file packets or other transfers like VPN?

Herein comes in Hawking Technology HBB1 Broadband Booster. However, as the name suggests, it doesn’t actually boosts anything but as Benjamin says - ‘certainly feels like it’. What the HBB1 does is that re-shapes your traffic before it hits your router. Installed between your router and cable router it will pick up the types of packets like VoIP, file, gaming, FTP etc., which are being sent out and will prioritize your packets.



The result?

The HBB1 will automatically give a higher priority to VoIP than it will file transfer, and will slow down the file transfer to allow VoIP though! So you have a QoS on your home network!!



Benjamin says,

Before I had this box about 70% of my VoIP calls ended up broken or with a long delay. After installing this box I have not had a single issue with our Vonage service, it works just as well if not better than a traditional phone line. Not only does the HBB1 improve my Vonage service, but it helps with Skype, online gaming, and video transfers. This is a fantastic product that every home VoIP user should seriously consider.