384.19 QOS for work from home and VOIP

[dave14305]

You have probably seen my other replies by now. I have another question about smartphones and voip. In the case of hardware based Voips ATAs its obvious that they are only generating voip traffic and reclassifying that with FlexOS is easy. Thank you.

What is your thought on smartphones and VOIP? They are used for many things so how does one pick out the voip traffic and treat it differently in that case? I was think that the voip carriers give you a URL for registration/service like for example vancouver1.voip.ms. While I could convert that into a Remote IP address its not recommended as there could a change in the underlying IP address due to network adjustments in the event of an emergency. So need another way.. Is there someway to make flexqos say only reclassify all traffic generated by say an android app like ZOIPER? PS. this is a much much lower priority thing.. the hardware ATAs was the big issue and you solved it .

You can sometimes get a list of ports from the software developer's support site to see if there's a pattern of ports you can put into a rule. Ultimately, you need to observe how the Trend Micro Adaptive QoS engine classifies the traffic, and if it's not what you'd expect, you need to keep studying the port/IP characteristics to see if there's a range that would catch it most of the time. I don't have much experience with VoIP apps, so I'll leave it to you and others to chime in on what works best for them.

In my own personal setup, most custom rules focus on work-from-home traffic (work and school - Skype, Zoom, Teams, etc.). I'm coming to the conclusion (slowly but surely) that if I just set 1 rule to redirect all UDP traffic from ports 1025-65535 to Work-From-Home, I could call it a day. But it's taken a while of observing and learning my own home traffic patterns to reach that conclusion (I still haven't done it though).

 

[ckong]

I do QoS at work, and have a VoIP phone while working from home. So here goes...

I'm thinking QoS won't really help in the OP's senerio. QoS is great to prioritize traffic, but it's mostly helpful on the transmit side of a connection. If a large amount of download traffic (like Steam updates) is maxing the link from the ISP to the customer, then any QoS applied by the customer is already too late as the downstream has already been saturated. What would fix it is if the ISP has QoS on their outgoing connection and prioritizes the traffic before it hits the pipe. But...ISPs aren't in the habit of prioritizing traffic based on user requests (DSCP values, IP ranges, port ranges, whatever)...so that's probably not going to happen.

Solutions?
1. Monitor the traffic. The Traffic Monitor has some very good information on whats using bandwidth. Asking the person nicely that's using the up the bandwidth might make them more aware.
2. Up the Internet connection speeds. I have Spectrum as my main link. It's a 200 down/20 upload speed connection. I'm also graphing my WAN port data on the Asus router with Cacti running on a LAMP server. With 5 people using the Internet for work/school/entertainment, the average daily usage normally doesn't exceed 60 mbps down (that's average mind you...with some micro-bursts of traffic near 100 mbps). According to the graphs, that's how it's been for over a year but I take it with a grain of salt as I know it can change anytime. All I'm saying is that by looking at some usage graphs, you can make a good educated guess at to your throughput needs.
3. Get a 2nd Internet connection. I'm currently experimenting and have a T-Mobile Internet Home Gateway as well as Spectrum. It's $50 per month and I've had it for about 2 months. The one time it could have helped...it didn't as someone with a hungry backhoe tore up the fiber in the street in our area and cut off all services to both ISPs (multiple calls to T-Mobile eventually revealed the two cell towers near my home were cut off as they get fed from Spectrum fiber. Oy!). Of course the jury's still out (that's whole lengthy topic by itself). And anyway...I like the idea of having a wireless ISP backup.

Just my $0.02.