Voice over IP (VoIP) is starting to gain some traction in the consumer realm.  Rather than getting your phone service from your local carrier, you can get a much more cost effective service from companies such as Skype, Vonage, and Packet8 with many, many more features than the traditional carriers.  VoIP runs over your broadband Internet connection, sharing bandwidth with other applications, and therein lies the problem.  How do you tell your bandwidth that your voice traffic is more important than your web site traffic?

I have had VoIP service from Vonage for a couple of years now.  I love it.  There’s a pretty big problem though, and it’s my upstream bandwidth.  While my cable provider allows me a blazing 8Mbps download rate, they only allow a laughable 256Kbps upload.  I do a lot of work from home which involves sending files back and forth.  Downloading files is just fine, however, I often run out of bandwidth when uploading.  Then I get a phone call.  Since I no longer have any uploading bandwidth, my phone does not have the ability to send my voice back up to my service provider, Vonage.  When I don’t have enough bandwidth to complete the call I get large amounts of lag, broken words, and sometimes the entire call is dropped.  This makes my phone completely unusable.

A friend of mine suggested that I get more bandwidth, but that won’t solve the problem, it will just shorten it.  Take a look at the graph below.  If I only have 256Kbps upload rate and I’m running a file transfer, my file will take 2 minutes to complete but it will eat all of my available bandwidth, thus killing my call.  If I get 1Mbps bandwidth (1000Kbps) it will only take 30 seconds to complete, but it will still kill my phone call for those 30 seconds.  Nothing is solved, the problem is just not there as long.

The current version of the Internet uses something called IPv4, or Internet Protocol Version 4.  This is a fairly old protocol that does not allow me to set up packet priority, often called Quality of Service (QoS).  QoS allows me to tell the Internet that my voice packets are more important that my file transfer packets, so upload the voice first and whatever is left over use for file transfer.  While this is over-simplifying it quite a bit and there are many exceptions to QoS, the basic concepts holds true for most people.  So how do we get QoS on our home bandwidth?  How can I tell my system that my voice traffic is far more important than my file transfer, iTunes, or VPN traffic?  The answer is the Hawking Technology HBB1 Broadband Booster.

Oddly enough, this device is not boosting anything, but it certainly feels like it is.  The HBB1 re-shapes your traffic before it hits your router.  In my configuration I have a Belkin Pre-N router, which connects to my cable router.  In between these boxes is the HBB1.  This nifty little device detects what type of packets are getting sent out, VoIP, gaming, FTP, HTTP, etc and will set a priority for them.  The Hawking 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.  In a nutshell, this device gives you QoS on your network!

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.

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