Travel Technology - Vonage AND T-Mobile hotspot at home?

Does anyone have Vonage AND T-mobile hotspot at home service on the same broadband connection? I've been tinkering with this for the last month or so and I can't get both of them to work well at the same time. I have the Vonage Linksys two-line Access Point (AP) and the T-Mobile AP and the service for whichever one I put first (right after the DSL modem) works great, but the other one works poorly. Right now, I have the Vonage AP first, then the T-Mobile and calls keep getting dropped on my cell (using wifi) whereas the Vonage sounds great. I called T-Mobile and they said "our AP has to be first after the modem", but of course Vonage says the same thing...

I had intended to drop vonage and just go with T-Mobile hotspot, but then I realized that my fax would no longer work (duh!!!), so that won't work for me.

Any ideas on how to get both to co-exisit would be greatly appreciated...

BTW, I did try putting a hub right after the modem and hooking both the Vonage AP and the T-Mobile AP into that hub and what I ended up with is both of the services working poorly. :(

Do you have a firewall on the DSL modem or do you have another firewall in use?

Do you have a firewall on the DSL modem or do you have another firewall in use?

nope. the firewall on the modem is turned off. I have firewalls on the AP though....

I would make sure you have NAT traversal on on the AP acting as the firewall (am assuming that is the first AP). You may also need to open tunnels through your firewall for the 2nd VoIP adapter. I don't have multiple APs in my home network, but I do have multiple VoIP adapters and don't seem to have any problems.

I would make sure you have NAT traversal on on the AP acting as the firewall (am assuming that is the first AP). You may also need to open tunnels through your firewall for the 2nd VoIP adapter. I don't have multiple APs in my home network, but I do have multiple VoIP adapters and don't seem to have any problems.

NAT was enabled, so that isn't the problem...

1. Coming soon, you can get a router from TMO & put in one or two sims - Hotspot@home wired.

2. To get your current setup working:

doesn't matter which is first - we'll just call them "A" and "B".
Router "A" connects to Cable modem
Router B uplink port connects to router A normal output ethernet port.
Router "A" gets configured "normally" - all the usual - dhcp server, etc.
Router "B" gets configured as a bridge:

Configure the local IP to an address on the subnet served by router "A", but outside the DHCP address range.
eg. router "A" serves 10.0.0/24; dhcp 10.0.0.1-10.0.0.31; router "B" 10.0.0.60 local address
Router "B" : DISABLE DHCP
Router B: Enable automatic configuration - DHCP... the local address sticks, but you need DHCP to pick up DNS
Router B: disable ddns

Make sure that "A" and "B" have different SSID's.
Make sure that "A" and "B" are on different channels.


One other note: you *should* be able to get hotspot working off of the Vonage router. Not recommended by anyone, but should work.

I have another suggestion, which will cost a little, but probably be simpler and better in the end. There is nothing more annoying than a bad telephone connection. Especially to the folks you are calling.

Buy a good quality router with plenty of ports and use it to connect to your DSL/Cable modem. Then connect all of your equipment, including the vonage and TMO devices to this "master router". That is my setup.

You might also want to program the "master" router to give priority to the various ports and protocols used by VOIP, but that is only a marginal improvement. You can search google for these, I can't remember at this point.

In essence you are giving each of the routers a parallel connection to the internet, rather than a serial one. I think what is happening, for whatever technical reasons, is the first one in the daisy chain is giving itself priority and choking the other one.

Kind of like the old Christmas lights when one bulb went out, the whole string went out.

I have another suggestion, which will cost a little, but probably be simpler and better in the end. There is nothing more annoying than a bad telephone connection. Especially to the folks you are calling.

Buy a good quality router with plenty of ports and use it to connect to your DSL/Cable modem. Then connect all of your equipment, including the vonage and TMO devices to this "master router". That is my setup.

You might also want to program the "master" router to give priority to the various ports and protocols used by VOIP, but that is only a marginal improvement. You can search google for these, I can't remember at this point.

In essence you are giving each of the routers a parallel connection to the internet, rather than a serial one. I think what is happening, for whatever technical reasons, is the first one in the daisy chain is giving itself priority and choking the other one.

Kind of like the old Christmas lights when one bulb went out, the whole string went out.

Actually, I don't know about the Vonage router, but the WRT54G-TM from T-Mobile won't do what you're saying. By default, no port (physical or logical) has priority over any other, wired or wireless, except that the VOIP takes precedence over other wi-fi connections on that SSID.
You cannot, AFAIK, set the actual correct priority bit from within these routers using the supplied firmware. I connect my wireless router through a linux-based firewall box in which I turn on the IP priority bit for VOIP traffic. Sadly, I have no way of knowing whether it's supported by the ISP upstream.

Buy a good quality router with plenty of ports and use it to connect to your DSL/Cable modem. Then connect all of your equipment, including the vonage and TMO devices to this "master router". That is my setup.




I will try this. I have a couple of dlink 1GB routers sitting around doing nothing...

In the Vonage router, pull up the internal screen for setting up the router and make sure that ipsec VPN pass through is enabled.